Anyone who questions whether Karen Russell deserves all the accolades she is getting need only read Vampires in the Lemon Grove – eight imaginative and devastating stories that often took my breath away.Of the eight, three stand out: the eponymous title story which features a married vampire couple who eschew all the old myths about what vampires SHOULD be like and satiate their thirst at a lemonade stand in Italy. “If you have been thirsty for a long time, if you have been suffering, then the a...

Not the best collection of short stories I've ever read, but Karen Russell chooses such imaginative and unusual subject matter that the stories are quickly engaging.Only one story in particular stands out as exceptional though, "Reeling for the Empire." It's haunting and a bit sickening, but incredibly original and should be anthologized. I expected a bit more out of this, but sadly a lot of them were forgettable. I would be interested in picking up one of her novels because she clearly has an v...

Over hyped, over rated, did not live up to my expectations.Every one of the 8 very short stories in this collection has a wonderful premise -- vampires who thirst for something other than blood, team krill at the ice floe of Antarctica, women trapped in a Japanese factory, flocks of seagulls stealing the parts of our future we most need, dead presidents as stabled horses, etc. And the language itself is poetic and beautiful and sometimes says the most startling things, but...The author can't tel...

If I had to summarize this collection of short stories in a word it would be "frustrating". Karen Russell is clearly a very gifted writer and several of these short stories approach masterful, but here is the problem - I don't think she knows how to finish a story. Each one of these little gems is unique and unlike any other story in the book - indeed, the style of the story varies wildly and wonderfully from story to story. Each story begins as a wonderfully weird little idea gem and Russell wr...

I was delighted by this collection of weird and wonderful stories. Almost as sprightly as Murakami and sometimes leaning toward the flavor of Annie Proulx’s gothic tall tales and encounters with supernatural in her collections on the American West. In the title story an ancient married couple, who happen to be immortal vampires, live among the gentry immigrated to Sorrento in sunny Italy. Magred and Clyde keep up a refined banter worthy of the anti-heroes in Pulp Fiction. At the end of the day o...

God damn it, Karen Russell. She's just too good at this, guys, and it's driving me crazy. No one should be able to do what Karen Russell does - her particular brand of magical realism, where the supernatural and suburban America blend seamlessly, is like nothing I've ever encountered before. It just isn't fair that all that talent got concentrated in one person. Vampires in the Lemon Grove is Russell's second collection of short stories - in my review of her first book, St. Lucy's Home for Girls...

Karen Russell seems to have jumped out of nowhere onto the mainstream literary scene with the publication of her first collection of stories St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves in 2006, at the age of 25. Her stories were published in Oxford American, The New Yorker and The Best American Short Stories. Her 2011 novel Swamplandia! was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2012. This is her latest collection of short fiction, which also served as my introduction to her work.Collections of sho...

Breadth. This 8-pack of short stories has it in spades. We have send-ups of vampire stories, Gothic Old West stories, contemporary stories, horror stories, humorous stories -- everything but haiku, practically. And, if your thing is "writers' writers," you've come to the right lemon grove. Karen Russell's best friends are words. She plays around with language, with sentences, with unexpected words, and she exults in it. Sometimes you just pause and say, "Nice."But what about the stories, plot-wi...

Just couldn't get into this one. The stories really struggled with narrative momentum. The title story and the second story are both very good. Then things... wane.

Appreciating this book was a slow process for me. I didn't always get the resolution that I desired out of the stories, but once I allowed myself to sit back, and enjoy the creativity and prose, I actually learned to love the book. I'm a huge fan of author's who have the ability to weave mysticism into an every-day thread and Russell does this beautifully. She has an uncanny ability to tackle a myriad of genres and come across as an expert. Her writing is beautiful. I feel the need to go back an...

I'm not ordinarily a fan of the short story form but having read the first 2 stories in this collection, I am making an exception. Karen Russell is wonderfully weird.The more I read, the more amazed I am. I've read 7 of the stories now. How a 30 year old woman can write this is beyond me....she must be an old soul, a brilliant old soul. I keep thinking I've just read my favorite story in the collection and then I read another one, and then I have new favorite.

This collection sees Karen Russell shift the balance between concept and narrative. While she has always handled both deftly, she made a name for herself by creating fantastical and fabulist scenarios. Those still remain, but the unreal elements of her stories seem subtler, serving to nudge the reader just outside of the possible, to let them see her deeply human narratives from a uniquely revealing angle. That’s because Russell is all about what's human, even if the human is sometimes a scarecr...

I haven't read Swamplandia!, her widely acclaimed novel, but I only liked a few of these short stories so I might not search it out, even if it was a Pulitzer finalist. I don't really have a problem with her writing technique per se - she can come up with good ways to describe things and there aren't any dumb sentences in here or anything - it's just that a lot of these stories don't end up being very interesting or compelling, with a few exceptions. All of these stories involve somewhat fantast...

3.5 Truly imaginative and so very well written. Some though were a little creepy even for me. Loved the first story, which is very unusual for me because even the word vampire will set me running, but in this case it did not. Open minded a bit, gave it a chnace and was presently surprised. Must be the lemons. I would like to get a glimpse into this author's mind, must be such an interesting place. Wavered between 3 and 4, 3 because some of them were quite a bit out there and 4 because the writin...