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
past reality talking
Whenever someone asks me about fantasy versus realism, I'm like, "I don't know, guys. Did we not all just descend into some underworld, watch strangers from our past kaleidoscope through us according to some pattern that is both illogical and has its own strange melting truth, and then wake up and have a Pop-Tart?" Why are we talking about fantasy and reality like they're opposed?
long red realist
It's funny, for a long time I would go watermelon-red and deny that I was a magical realist. It felt imprecise to me, a misrepresentation.
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.
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.
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.
stories realizing mortals
You small mortals don't realize the power of your stories.
real want encounters
I want a real encounter with something true and disconcerting about peoples' natures.
reality everyday fiction
Fiction helps me to reconnect with the true, deep weirdness inherent in everyday reality, in our dealings with one another, in just being alive.
best changed cube figured ice melting prose though
The very best moment of writing 'Swamplandia!' was when I figured out what the ending should be. And even though I changed the prose of it, that realization was an ice cube melting in my chest.
grew southern super
I grew up reading a lot of these super weird, genre-bending Southern gothic writers.
books content death forces hear inside love meet shaped speak stories time together
I'd love to meet Flannery O'Connor. I think I'd be content to hear her speak on any subject. What forces shaped her. What nebula of books and stories were whirling together inside her at the time of her death.
ecological expanding growing life people rapidly reckoning reconcile sort talking time trying
I was sort of growing up at a time of really rapidly expanding ecological consciousness. It was a time of reckoning when people were talking about how the Everglades was on life support. I was always trying to reconcile it as a kid.
badly might somebody spanish
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.
george sophomore took workshop
I took a fiction-writing workshop my sophomore year at Northwestern, and I hadn't yet read Junot Diaz or George Saunders, Flannery O'Connor. There was something so attractive about those voices.