Of Dust and Dreams: Poets and Writers on Karen Russell
Sweeping, gothic and gritty, The Antidote is a genre-bending tour-de-force. Journey to the heart of Nebraska in this transportive story about history, American ideology, and community. Read on for an excellent excerpt from Poets & Writers‘ March/April cover story on Karen Russell’s (Swamplandia!) new novel. Grab the latest issue of Poets & Writers at your nearest B&N Newsstand today.
Hardcover $30.00
The Antidote: A Novel
The Antidote: A Novel
In Stock Online
Hardcover $30.00
From Pulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestselling author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove Karen Russell: a gripping dust bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town
From Pulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestselling author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove Karen Russell: a gripping dust bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town
From the magazine:
Karen Russell’s new novel, The Antidote, was born of a single image: A woman holds a sparkling emerald-green horn to her ear through which she receives someone’s secret and stores it for them, as if she were a living, breathing bank, a vault of flesh and bone safeguarding the memories of others.
Russell was writing her debut novel, Swamplandia!, when this witch appeared to her in 2009. Two years later, Swamplandia! (Knopf), a New York Times best-seller, was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, adding to the young author’s already impressive accolades—among them a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” award and a spot on the New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 list. Far from idling on these laurels, Russell’s prodigious imagination was already spinning her follow-up, which centered on that witch. In a 2012 craft lectures for the Tin House Summer Workshop called “Engineering Impossible Architectures,” she discussed this novel-in-progress, from its setting, the American Dust Bowl, to the sentient scarecrow that plays a pivotal role in the plot. The following year, her then-boyfriend, now spouse, Tony Perez—a freelance, writer, editor, and screenwriter who at the tome worked for Tin House—said that at one point Russell sketched out the fundamentals of the story for him, from characters to ending scene. “To a rube like me,” he says, “it seemed like it was just a matter of sitting down and typing it up.”