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
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.
believe fantastic learned literal people stories wild work
In workshopping short stories I learned how to get character down, and how to work with ratios of literal to fantastic to make a world that people can believe in even if it's a little wild or out there.
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.
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.
stories figures
Once you figure out what's best for the story, take out the rest.
space insightful stories
In short stories there's more permission to be elliptical. You can have image-logic, or it's almost like a poem in that you can come to a lot of meanings within a short space.
stories realizing mortals
You small mortals don't realize the power of your stories.
two would-be stories
If you're short on time, that would be the two-word version of our story: we fell.
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.
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.
drafting fun talking writers
Writers get embarrassed sometimes in talking about how much fun writing can be, but drafting is often really enjoyable. Often, you're tumbling in the dark, and you don't know where the story is going to lead.