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.
new-york writing stories
I moved to New York with the derangement of love. I was writing all these terrible stories, but I had never been happier.
way myth valuable
Myth continues to be a valuable way to understand parts of our nature that we can't quantify.
feelings generations picnics
A food truce, the picnic suspension of oedipal feeling that permits the generations to love each other at family reunions.
book white madness
Madness, as I understood it from books, meant a person who was open to the high white whine of everything.
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.
beautiful vocabulary helping
Mythology is a really beautiful vocabulary passed down through centuries that helps us understand the perennial parts of our nature.
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.
girl way
The girl has a funny way of romanticizing things.
regret pilgrimage
Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose.
motivation real dark
I think that's the real horror story for me, how little you can ever really know about your own motivations. How in the dark we all are about the concerns and the contents of our minds.
loss evil spinning
Sometimes it can feel like the whole globe is spinning with irredeemable losses, capricious natural disasters and crimes so outrageously evil they dismantle any attempt to solve or explain them.
stories figures
Once you figure out what's best for the story, take out the rest.
Somehow I wasn't adding up right anymore. My parts weren't summing into myself.