Karen Russell
Karen Russell
Karen Russellis an American novelist and short story writer. Her debut novel, Swamplandia!, was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She was also the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant" in 2013...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth10 July 1981
CountryUnited States of America
understanding luck doe
Given the brevity of our time here, it does seem likely that our species, too, must have at best a blinkered understanding of the shape of things, the import of certain events and what distinguishes 'good' from 'bad' luck.
around-the-world students immersion
I would love to travel around the world working for a travel company taking students abroad on cultural immersion trips.
dream mean sleep
My fingers curl through the holes in the wicker, through the wet grass beneath it, trying to hold tight to the sharp blades of the present. Somewhere in my brain a sinkhole is bubbling over, and each bubble contains a scene from a tiny sunken world ... I have never been the prophet of my own past before. It makes me wonder how the healthy dreamers can bear to sleep at all, if sleep means that you have to peer into that sinkhole by yourself. ... I had almost forgotten this occipital sorrow, the way you are so alone with the things you see in dreams.
parent betray
Could we betray our parents by going back to them?
reading shoes locks
When I was younger I used to lock myself in the bathroom and read in the dry tub. I was also a fan of the 'shoe closet.' Reading felt thrilling and illicit and deeply private to me, and I felt vulnerable doing it in public.
writing thinking stories
And I do think that great fiction, even when it's comedic, has an urgency or an inevitability to it, a sense that the writer absolutely had to write this particular story in this way.
mom men use
My mom says I'm destined to be the sort of man who uses big words but pronounces them incorrectly.
writing thinking secret
It's funny to think about the uncanny reflexively, as an author who is perhaps gradually becoming aware of my own hidden secrets. Accessing that shadowy territory really requires the physical act of writing.
lonely alive fierce
It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity.
mom fighting thinking
But if you kept thinking about a fight you’d lost, Mom said, you were programming yourself to lose again.
sister night age
"I'm not going anywhere," she told me that night. But until we are old ladies-a cypress age, a Sawtooth age-I will continue to link arms with her, in public, in private, in a panic of love.
stories figures
Once you figure out what's best for the story, take out the rest.
tragedy caves bats
I didn’t realize that one tragedy can beget another, and another — bright-eyed disasters flooding out of a death hole like bats out of a cave.
stories realizing mortals
You small mortals don't realize the power of your stories.