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
territory grows new-territory
I hope that in my thirties I grow as a writer, push into new territory.
feelings generations picnics
A food truce, the picnic suspension of oedipal feeling that permits the generations to love each other at family reunions.
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.
beautiful block names
At the end of the block where I used to live in Coconut Grove in Miami, there's a swampy area, a no-name alcove with a little mangrove estuary. It's beautiful.
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.
swim ponies desperate
I swim with all my strength. No superhuman surge, or pony heroics; it's just me at my most desperate.
strong father thinking
I had been eagerly waiting just such a disaster. Storms, wolves, snakebite, floods-these are the occasions to find out how your father sees you, how strong and necessary he thinks you are.
real mean thinking
America's great talent, I think, is to generate desires that would never have occurred, natively,... and to make those desires so painfully real that money becomes a fiction, an imaginary means to some concrete end.
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?
children writing thinking
You don't want people to think you're just writing stories for children about a pig in a tutu.
character reality process
When I'm drafting, I suppose it's an intuitive process - figuring out when something just has a surreal glaze on it and when it grapples with something that could threaten a character's day-to-day reality.
florida swamps alligators
I spent most of my 20s with these alligator wrestlers in the swamps of South Florida.
book white madness
Madness, as I understood it from books, meant a person who was open to the high white whine of everything.