Latest news with #KarenRussell
Winnipeg Free Press
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
On the night table
Guy Gavriel Kay Author, Written on the Dark I often give shout outs to authors I've loved, not so much authors I've just read — but I've just read Karen Russell's new novel The Antidote, which is being talked up as a potential Pulitzer Prize winner. And I enjoyed that. Ted Davis photo Guy Gavriel Kay Buy on Weekly A weekly look at what's happening in Winnipeg's arts and entertainment scene. I love Patrick Modiano, the French Nobel Prize Laureate; I think he's a sorcerer as a writer. I love Penelope Fitzgerald, the English writer — A.S. Byatt said she's the greatest English writer since the Second World War, which is pretty hyperbolic, but anybody who gets that said about them has something going for them. I read primarily contemporary fiction, and re-read a lot. As I get older, every fourth or fifth book I read is going back to something I loved. It's nervous making, because you might go back to a book you loved when you were an undergrad or 30 years old, or 15 years old, and find that it's not so great. It's a relief, almost, to re-read something 30 or 40 years later and say, 'wow, this really is good' — you feel good about yourself. The Antidote
Time Magazine
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
The 14 Best Books of 2025 So Far
There's no better time than the start of summer to take a pause and reset your priorities. And, if we may be so bold, one of those priorities really should be to dig into one of the many great new books that have been published this year. It's only June, and yet we've already been blessed with a wealth of heart-rending memoirs, absorbing novels, and mind-expanding nonfiction. Meander through the beguiling mind of a theater actress, take a siblings road trip that challenges the very notion of family, or delve into a deep, personal secret. Here, the 14 best books of the year so far. The Antidote, Karen Russell It feels like the U.S. has lived 100 lifetimes since Karen Russell's much-lauded 2011 debut Swamplandia!, but it's safe to say that her highly anticipated follow-up The Antidote was worth the wait. An American epic that takes place in the 1930s in the fictional town of Uz, Neb., the story centers on a prairie witch who calls herself 'the Antidote.' A healer of sorts, the Antidote, like other prairie witches, is a keeper of others' thoughts—a memory vault who absorbs the heaviness of people's grief so they may have a chance at feeling lightness again. But when a dust bowl devastates the town, it takes the witch's memory deposits with it and leaves her fearful for her safety. What will happen to her when people can no longer unload their worst—and have to actually live with themselves? Told from the vantage point of multiple inhabitants of Uz, The Antidote is a sprawling yet meticulous story that implores us to see American history in its fullness, scars and all.— Rachel Sonis Audition, Katie Kitamura's taut and incisive follow-up to Intimacies, begins on a rich premise. The narrator, a successful actress navigating a difficult new role, goes to a Manhattan restaurant to meet a younger man, Xavier, who claims he's her son. It's impossible. The actress, who goes unnamed, has never given birth or been a parent. But the strange encounter isn't their last; Xavier begins working on the same play, and his bold assertion prompts her to unravel the many choices and performances that have brought her to this particular moment, on stage and in life. Halfway through, Audition changes realities, completely redefining the relationship between the two. Kitamura's tantalizing novel asks a lot of the reader, offering multiple versions of the same life that circle around an idea raised by the protagonist herself:'As you get older things become less clear.' —Mahita Gajanan In his second novel, Ocean Vuong sheds the epistolary conceit of his acclaimed debut, 2019's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. The result is a more sprawling yet direct coming-of-age tale animated by the specificity of its characters. When we meet 19-year-old Hai, he's standing ominously on a bridge in his depressed hometown of East Gladness, Conn. His first love is dead of a fentanyl overdose and his mom believes the flimsy lie that he's at medical school, leaving Hai with a craving for opioids and nowhere to go. Before he can do anything drastic, he's spotted by a dementia-stricken elderly woman, Grazina, who must sense his fundamental gentleness, because she says he can move into her place if he'll care for her. Along with his misfit coworkers at a fast-food joint, Grazina anchors the lost boy, even as her own mind drifts from its moorings. A premise that a lesser writer might churn into inspiration porn becomes, in Vuong's hands, a vivid, funny, emotionally realistic case study in the life-altering potential of community.— Judy Berman There are many debut novels about young people finding love and seeking purpose, but few are as perceptive about the connection between those pursuits as Naomi Xu Elegant's ruminative Gingko Season. Stubbornly fixated on a college boyfriend who broke her heart, 20-something narrator Penelope Lin works at a Philadelphia museum, pores over the city's history, and maintains a modest social life, largely disconnected from her family. When she meets a guy, Hoang, who has just confessed to freeing mice marked for death at the lab where he works, their excruciatingly slow-moving courtship pushes Penelope to think harder about her own principles and priorities. Elegant's writing is as unassuming as her heroine, yet the questions she raises about how to live with integrity in a compromised world can be startlingly profound.— Judy Berman The argument that flows from this book is simple: rivers, for all of the essential nutrients, biodiversity, and transportation possibilities they provide, deserve to be treated with the same respect as other living organisms. Robert Macfarlane visited three rivers, starting with the River of the Cedars in an Ecuadorian cloud forest, recently threatened by mining companies. He surveyed waterways in Chennai, India, which flood streets with crocodiles and catfish after cyclones. And he visited Mutehekau Shipu in Quebec, the first Canadian river to be given rights, including the right to be pollution-free. The author of Underland lends his expertise to raise awareness about a part of nature that is often taken for granted. Readers see that while rivers can be easily wounded, they can also quickly heal—if given the right care.— Olivia B. Waxman Ron Chernow, the author of the best-selling tomes Alexander Hamilton and Grant, offers a frank assessment of Mark Twain, the first major literary celebrity in the U.S. and a leading pundit of the Civil War era whose writings helped Americans make sense of life after slavery. While his novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn became classics, Twain made poor financial decisions that bankrupted him and forced him to flee the country and spend nearly a decade in exile. Chernow's biography gives the encyclopedic treatment to the writer, boasting about 1,200 pages based on his books, letters, and unpublished manuscripts. —Olivia B. Waxman In this dystopian speculative fiction novel, Vietnamese Americans are shipped to internment camps following a terrorist attack, with their civil rights and dignity stripped in the name of national security. While the premise could result in an overly dour or preachy book, Nguyen's novel zips forward with page-turning suspense, humor, and nuance. The book revolves around four half-siblings as they each confront difficult ethical choices and navigate their relationships with an oppressive state, cultural expectations, and each other. While parts of the novel are carefully grounded in history—especially in the experience of Japanese-American incarceration during World War II—the book also crackles with modern culture and proves gaspingly relevant in an era of division and heightened surveillance.— Andrew R. Chow At the center of Nicole Cuffy's O Sinners! is Faruq Zaidi, a Brooklyn-based journalist grieving the recent death of his devout Muslim father. After learning about a cult called 'the nameless,' whose followers abide by teachings like "create beauty" and "do not despair at death," Faruq—a skeptic who has felt disconnected from faith and religion since he was a teenager—travels to their compound in the California Redwoods to report a story. But as he grows closer to the group's inscrutable leader, a Black Vietnam War veteran called Odo, Faruq begins to question more than just the secret inner-workings of the cult itself. O Sinners! is driven by three alternating narratives: Faruq's present day work trip, Odo's tour of duty in Vietnam, and the screenplay of a documentary about a legal battle between the cult and a fundamentalist church in Texas. In weaving together these stories, Cuffy explores the varying shapes that grief, belief, and belonging can take. —Erin McMullen In late October 2023, Omar El Akkad started to outline his feelings about the war in Gaza, and how it feels to be a person unanchored from home. In his urgent nonfiction debut, the writer—who was born in Cairo, grew up in Doha, moved to Canada, and now lives in rural Oregon—wrestles with his disillusionment with the West and its institutions, particularly given the indifference he's observed in so many as the war rages on. This memoir-manifesto could be seen as hopeless, and there is certainly no shortage of carnage in its pages. But, in the determination of those standing up for their beliefs, El Akkad manages to find hope amid the fantasy of Western liberalism.— Meg Zukin In Kevin Wilson's latest novel, Mad spends her days working on a farm with her mom. She hasn't seen her dad in two decades and she's settled into a routine that's not particularly fulfilling, but she's made her peace with that. Then, a stranger appears at her front door and announces that he's her older half-brother, and that their father pulled a disappearing act on not just him and Mad, but other families too. He convinces her to join him on a cross-country road trip to round up their other siblings and find their father. What ensues is an often hilarious and sometimes devastating exploration of what really makes a family. Like Wilson's other fiction, including Nothing to See Here and Now Is Not the Time to Panic, Run for the Hills gently tugs at the heart.— Annabel Gutterman Sky Daddy is a love story, but one we're willing to bet is unlike any love story you've previously encountered. Drawing inspiration from Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Kate Folk's debut novel revolves around one woman's pursuit of her own white whale: finding her aircraft 'soulmate.' That's really the premise: our eccentric protagonist, Linda, wants to fall in love with a plane—and, in a morbid twist, she wants to 'consummate' that relationship by dying in an aviation accident. Linda is a San Francisco transplant who makes $20 an hour moderating hate comments for a video-sharing platform and devotes as much of that meager salary as possible to exploring the aircraft dating pool by catching flights. Linda is determined to keep her unusual proclivities a secret, but after her work friend, Karina, invites her to a monthly 'Vision Board Brunch' with some old college friends, Linda's attempts to manifest her idea of romantic bliss end up setting her on a path to radical self-acceptance. Sky Daddy is as poignant as it is bizarre— Megan McCluskey The Tell, Amy Griffin Rarely, if ever, has a book been endorsed by all three titans in the celebrity book club world—Oprah, Reese Witherspoon, and Jenna Bush Hager—but Amy Griffin's The Tell is no ordinary memoir. For readers of Tara Westover's Educated or Chanel Miller's Know My Name, The Tell is one of those deeply personal stories that manages to feel universal at the same time. Griffin was thriving as a businesswoman and happily married mother of four in New York City when a session with an MDMA therapist flooded her mind with long-buried memories. Suddenly, she remembered the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of a teacher starting when she was 12 years old. Shattered and enraged, Griffin struggled to reconcile her past with her carefully constructed self-image and grappled with the weight of carrying such a harrowing secret. Her memoir retraces her steps through her private grief and isolating pursuit of justice, and, ultimately, her powerful realization that to tell is to heal.— Lucy Feldman After her teenage son James dies by suicide, Yiyun Li begins writing. It's what she knows how to do. The prolific author has, tragically, been in this position before. Her older son, Vincent, died by suicide in 2017. In her transcendent new book, she writes that she does not ruminate on grief, because to grieve suggests a process to which there is an end. She knows that to continue living is to accept that she will be a parent to her children for the rest of her life. In sparing prose that cuts deeply, Li examines the relationship between language and loss, honoring the sons who she carries with her, always.— Annabel Gutterman Emma Pattee's Tilt is an apocalyptic nightmare come to life. Annie is nine months pregnant and shopping at Ikea when Oregon is hit with 'the big one'—the earthquake that people in the Pacific Northwest have been anticipating for years. Pattee's thrilling debut tracks Annie's journey through rubble, chaos, hope, and despair as she searches for her husband amid the disaster. Tilt is a propulsive account of survival, and how humanity shows up under the pressure of a catastrophe. As she treks across Portland, Annie flashes back to moments that shed light on her life choices thus far. Her marriage and career are thrust under a microscope as she encounters others in crisis: the wounded, the searching, the lost, and the desperate. Best read in one sitting, Tilt is a raw examination of motherhood and its most extreme demands.— Meg Zukin
CBS News
09-03-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
Book excerpt: "The Antidote" by Karen Russell
We may receive an affiliate commission from anything you buy from this article. Karen Russell, the bestselling author of "Swamplandia!" and "Vampires in the Lemon Grove," returns with a magical new novel, "The Antidote" (available March 11 from Knopf), a Nebraska Dust Bowl-era tale of a prairie witch, who stores the memories that townsfolk don't want to carry. And with farms going bankrupt and a string of murders terrifying the town, there are lots of things these people don't want to remember. $27 at Amazon Try Audible for free Prologue Deposit 69818060-1-77 Harp Oletsky's First Memory It is nowhere you chose to be, and yet here you are. Papa steers your shoulders into the heart of the jack drive. Hundreds of rabbits stare at you through the wire around the fence posts. It feels like looking into the mirror. They do not want to be in this story either. Men have been working since dawn to herd the wild jacks into this pen. The town has gathered to solve the problem of the rabbits, who chew through rangeland and cropland, who eat the golden wheat your papa turns into money. Worse than the locusts, says Papa. Every hide brings a penny bounty. So many turnipy sweating bodies and a festive feeling in the air like a penny rubbed between two fingers, like blood shocked into a socket. A smell that reminds you of the room where babies are born. When you try to turn and run away, Papa grabs you. There's Mr. O'Malley, Mr. Waldowko, Mr. Zalewski, Mrs. Haage. You can't remember any more names. A hundred jointed arms come swinging into the pen that is alive with jackrabbits, the place of no escape. Now there is only madness. Terror of cudgels, terror of ax handles and hammers, terror of being trampled. "Papa! Help! Stop!" Rabbits run over your feet. "Settle down, Harp— " Papa is angry. He pours your name over your head like scalding water. The rabbits are angry. The rabbits are crying and dying, the clubs coming down, down, down. "If you ain't gonna help, stay clear of us, boy— " You are six today. Your family will have a party after supper. The cake was cooling when you left for town. You feel sick thinking about it. Cherries come slopping out of the rabbits. Gray skins are splitting, slipping under bootheels and wooden bats. Papa shows you what to target: the skulls and the spines of the screaming jacks. It's the fastest way to stop their screaming. There is another way, a voice cries out inside you. Smash it flat. You watch Papa click into his rhythm and begin to kill alongside the rest of the men. You meet your baby sister's gaze through the fan of her clean fingers. Lada is sitting on your mother's lap. Three girls you know are watching from outside the fence. The girls are allowed to squeal and shield their faces. You wish you were a girl with them. Down, down, down come the clubs and the planks. Your stomach bulges and flattens. You are screaming with the rabbits. Your birthday wish is to get to the end of this sound. Quiet comes at last. The men's arms rest against their sides like tools in a shed. Women are hanging the dead jacks to dry by their long ears. Every twitching rabbit's foot has stilled. Inside of you, the screaming continues. It goes on and on and on. Papa finds you where you have hidden your eyes behind your hands, your tears inside your palms. "We can't let the jacks overrun the whole prairie. No one likes it, Son." This is a lie. Many had liked it. You shut your eyes along with the dead rabbits, because you did not want to see whose faces were smiling. "Here," says Papa. "One is still living. You cannot be softhearted, Harp." Your father puts the club in your hands. And after that, you are always afraid. From "The Antidote" by Karen Russell. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Karen Russell. Get the book here: $27 at Amazon $30 at Barnes & Noble Buy locally from
Washington Post
06-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Karen Russell's ‘The Antidote' is a dazzlingly original American epic
In 2011, Karen Russell cast a spell over readers with her uncanny debut novel, 'Swamplandia!' She wasn't kidding about that exclamation point. The story involves a plucky 13-year-old girl determined to revive her family's alligator park. 'Swamplandia!' went on to become a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. That year, Russell's novel was up against an unfinished manuscript by an author who'd died in 2008 and a revised version of a novella published in the Paris Review almost a decade earlier. Historically speaking, being above ground with a new, finished novel has been a great advantage when it comes to winning a Pulitzer. But, alas, that year, in its inscrutable wisdom, the Pulitzer board decided not to give a prize for fiction.
The Guardian
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Antidote by Karen Russell review – a magical realist Dust Bowl tale
The latest novel from Karen Russell, author of the highly acclaimed Swamplandia!, is set in a 1930s Nebraska town called Uz, after the home of the biblical Job. The name is apt; it's the time of the Dust Bowl, when the Great Plains states of the US suffered drought and colossal dust storms that blighted agriculture and turned a generation of farmers into climate refugees. The book has four protagonists, all with some connection to uncanny powers. The Antidote of the title is a 'prairie witch' with the ability to take away people's unwanted memories and hold them against the day the owner is ready to remember. Harp Oletsky is a farmer who finds his land is miraculously spared from the catastrophic 'Black Sunday' dust storm; in its wake, the sky is blue over his fields alone, and they fill with healthy wheat. His teenage niece, Dell, is dealing with the murder of her mother by obsessively playing basketball and apprenticing herself to the Antidote as a trainee witch. Cleo Allfrey is a black photographer, sent to Nebraska by the New Deal's Resettlement Administration to document the suffering of farmers. She buys a camera in a local pawn shop that turns out to have uncanny powers of its own: its photographs show scenes from potential futures and forgotten pasts. The novel also has brief sections from the perspectives of a haunted scarecrow and a stray cat. The great theme of The Antidote is deliberate amnesia – particularly that of white people about the ethnic cleansing of Native peoples that set the stage for the Dust Bowl. Under the care of the Pawnee, these prairies were lush, vibrantly living places, with crops and agricultural practices adapted to regional drought cycles; after the massacres and forced relocations that removed them, the topsoil has risen into the air as a vicious ghost that burns the eyes and lungs. Since this is magical realism, the storms aren't just a physical consequence, but a haunting, a supernatural judgment on the people who inherited the fruits of a genocide. To heal, the community must first remember. The Antidote and Cleo Allfrey, with her haunted camera, are well positioned to kickstart this process. The most salient quality of The Antidote is the beauty and power of Russell's writing, especially in documenting horrors. Here is a jack drive, where rabbits are driven into an enclosure to be slaughtered as pests: 'The rabbits are crying and dying, the clubs coming down, down, down … Grey skins are splitting, slipping under bootheels and wooden bats … Quiet comes at last. The men's arms rest against their sides like tools in a shed. Women are hanging the dead jacks to dry by their long ears … Inside of you, the screaming continues.' The book also abounds in small delights such as, 'Poor guitar! I sometimes stared, with sympathy, at the shocked hole in its centre,' or this description of trying to silence a guilty conscience: 'The thought was like a loose knot I had to keep retying.' There are, however, two weaknesses that rob the book of much of its potential power. First, the plot is frustratingly scattered. Developments that initially seem crucial are left with no resolution; a narrative about the string of murders that included the killing of Dell's mother is especially odd, as we're asked to just stop caring about it midway through the book. Many scenes are devoted to Dell's basketball career, while the crimes against Natives on which the story turns happen entirely off stage. Through this, Russell is easily good enough to keep us engaged. No writer, however, could be good enough to make it a feature and not a bug. Second, Russell's narrators seem more like 21st-century liberals than rural citizens of 1930s Nebraska. The white protagonists start out anti-racist, then go through an awakening that has them devoting their lives to atoning for their historical complicity in genocide. Meanwhile, they never worry about feeding themselves, though it's unclear how this is possible for the Oletskies, since Harp is a no-yield farmer with huge debts to the bank, and his new miracle crop hasn't yet been sold. Some elements feel jarringly anachronistic: Dell plays on an integrated girls' basketball team, and when she falls in love with a teammate, she understands and embraces what she's feeling without any panic or dissonance about the implications of being gay. There is no sense that Cleo Allfrey's status as a black female photographer makes her an almost unbelievable exception to every rule. She also never seems culturally black, which, in the heavily segregated 1930s, calls for an explanation that is never forthcoming. While such fudging of history can work in some contexts (Bridgerton being an obvious example), it feels inappropriate in a work of political fiction about the moral imperative to accurately remember the past even when it makes us uncomfortable. The Antidote is clearly the work of a writer with prodigious gifts. But every novelist with a long enough career will ultimately produce a book where they've bitten off more than they can chew, or chewed and swallowed something they should have spat out. Despite The Antidote's laudable ambitions and interesting conception, I'm afraid, for Russell, this is that book. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion The Antidote is published by Chatto & Windus (£18.99) on 13 March. To support the Guardian and Observer, buy your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
