“The girls rattle their OxyContin”

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 22:52:00 +0000

After years of writerly girlcrush, I finally met Karen Russell at the Philadelphia Free Library, a few blocks from her home in downtown Philly. Some karmic voodoo had Amity Gaige and I reading with Russell that evening, the birthday of Russell’s third book, the gutsy and glittering story collection "Vampires in the Lemon Grove."

A few days prior, our mutual heroine, Joy Williams (we cooed her name together) wrote in the New York Times, that a “grim, stupendous, unfavorable magic is at work in these stories.”

Deep within the Free Library’s lime-hued innards, Russell, the surrealist wunderkind, giddily clutched a stack of other people’s books and a half-gone diet A&W root beer, which seemed like a detail from one of her own off-kilter and perfectly true stories. She was a powder keg of energy, and yet somehow completely at ease.

We discussed “book tour PTSD,” cosmic smite, and a period when everyone around her assumed "Swamplandia!" a stillborn. It would, of course, go one to be a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize.

Karen Russell’s vampires have bite

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 17:00:00 +0000

HERE'S THE LAMEST review equation in the world: Musician X + Filmmaker Y =Writer Z. So, forgive me this transgression (I just can’t help myself): Karen Russell is like some weird, perfect blend of singer-songwriter Neko Case and Studio Ghibli mastermind Hayao Miyazaki. Dreamy and gleeful and muscular, Russell, like these other artists, succeeds on her own terms: she’s a swaggering world-builder, a center-tent carnival barker, a wild-eyed curator of all things fantastic. Her half-mad tales give breath to an exuberant chorus of confused souls. And she’s not tied down to any genre. She summons influences as diverse as H.P. Lovecraft and Joy Williams, Shirley Jackson and Michael Chabon, Italo Calvino and Carson McCullers, Mark Richard and Ray Bradbury, and weaves it all — as only a young marvel can — into something wholly new, something majestic and real.
Vampires in the Lemon Grove is Russell’s third book, following debut story collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and debut novel Swamplandia!, both widely recognized as stunning inventions. It features eight stories, each shot through with dizzying language, in which we’re introduced to lemon-munching vampires, silkworm-girls, seagull armies, apocalyptic pioneers, ex-presidents reincarnated as horses, the perilous practice of Antarctic tailgating, a massage therapist who inherits the memories of a tortured young veteran, and a scarecrow that haunts a posse of young bullies. Russell’s characters — always somewhere between tender and vicious — are lovingly, carefully rendered. Full of magic and myth, they’re our guides through the strangest and darkest stretches of Russell’s heaven-bright imagination. And they’re funny. Man, are they funny. They whimper and whelp and wail and beg to be danced with.

Salon.com > karen russell

“The girls rattle their OxyContin”

Karen Russell’s vampires have bite