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
writing trying favorites-things
I really try to write every day. It's hard, but it's my favorite thing to do, so it's usually not too, too hard.
class vocabulary dumb
My favorite classes were always dumb nerdy vocabulary.
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.
swim ponies desperate
I swim with all my strength. No superhuman surge, or pony heroics; it's just me at my most desperate.
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.
diapers news morbid
What passes for news is just morbid speculation or cartoonish screaming, followed by diaper commercials.
crazy blood unbelievable
It remains unbelievable to me that I have any readers beyond my own blood relations - it's a crazy, wild gift.
country pay norway
I have a B.A. in Spanish, so briefly I thought that somebody might pay me to speak Spanish badly in another country, like Norway.
voice people house
Tin House magazine is a port in the storm for people who love language. It is unfailingly excellent, and committed to publishing new voices in addition to delivering freaky-fresh work from established writers.
eye thinking voice
In a way, I think we all want to look to that journalistic voice as a kind of global omniscience, a big eye to correct for our own limited purview: "Here's a realistic accounting of the world in which we live."
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?
territory grows new-territory
I hope that in my thirties I grow as a writer, push into new territory.
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.