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
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.
florida swamps alligators
I spent most of my 20s with these alligator wrestlers in the swamps of South Florida.
moving writing focus
I have friends who are capable of writing a very rough draft and then going back and embroidering - they're sort of the cathedral builders of fiction. I never really know what I'm doing, and all my pleasure's on the level of the line. It's a weird way to move forward. It's kind of like a way to caterpillar your way through these great woods. The best ones, whatever I feel like I'm writing about, some other secret thing will begin to come into focus.
children writing thinking
You don't want people to think you're just writing stories for children about a pig in a tutu.
brother dad war
Granana doesn't understand what the big deal is. She didn't cry at Olivia's funeral, and I doubt she even remembers Olivia's name. Granana lost, like, ninety-two million kids in childbirth. All of her brothers died in the war. She survived the Depression by stealing radish bulbs from her neighbors' garden, and fishing the elms for pigeons. Dad likes to remind us of this in a grave voice, as if it explained her jaundiced pitilessness: "Boys. Your grandmother ate pigeons.
stupid hate people
I came to hate the complainers, with their dry and crumbly lipsticks and their wrinkled rage and their stupid, flaccid, old-people sun hats with brims the breadth of Saturn's rings.
kids debt rays
The folks I read as a kid really set me up. I owe a huge debt to Ray Bradbury and Madeleine L'Engle.
book writing symphony
It took me the bulk of my twenties to write one book about a family of alligator wrestlers. Whereas somebody like Steve Martin is releasing his latest banjo symphony, having just completed another movie and acclaimed, best-selling novel.
mom men use
My mom says I'm destined to be the sort of man who uses big words but pronounces them incorrectly.
lonely alive fierce
It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity.
pain body pockets
Pain collected into deep pockets and I was aware of this painbut somehow I could not seem to feel it. It was like a body-deafness.
swim extinction certain
There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction.
mom fighting thinking
But if you kept thinking about a fight you’d lost, Mom said, you were programming yourself to lose again.