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These eight collected tales became increasingly more bizarre as they incorporated recognisable aspects of historical or modern-day life and subverted them into uncanny, Gothic creations. The prose was as otherworldly as the contents and I was seriously impressed with this anthology. Not every short story is going to appeal in any collection, but this one retained my attention and intrigue throughout.Here are my individual rating for each story:The Prospectors - 4.5/5 stars The Bad Graft - 3.75/5...
Having new books by Helen Phillips (The Need – read it immediately) and Karen Russell in the same year is almost more excitement than I can handle. Both writers work in the literary surreal/purgatorial/unsettling/horror/weird space and I very much love it. These stories are truly brilliant and Russell is a master storyteller (but we knew that already).
NOW AVAILABLE!!!i've already read and reviewed the first two stories in this collection (The Prospectors and The Bad Graft) during 2017's december advent calendar, so i'm ahead of the game! and you, too, can be ahead of the game, as four of the eight stories in this collection previously appeared in the new yorker. here are your links: orange world, bog girl, the prospectors, and the bad graft.i'm not sure if the other stories can be found elsewhere, but don't go looking for them online - they a...
How does she condense so much narrative into each perfectly calibrated, brightly colored story? The secret must lie in those sentences, oh my GOD, Russell’s prose is a reminder of what it is to read and enjoy a singular voice. I am so in love with this book. It’s her best so far, and that’s saying a LOT.
This is my second favorite Karen Russell (I will always hold St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves as one of my favorite books.) Top stories include The Bad Graft, Bog Girl: A Romance, and The Gondoliers. All of these have some kind of conflict between humans and the natural world, from infiltrating cacti to corpses to a Florida covered in toxic water.Here is a link to The Bad Graft in the New Yorker if you want to try it out.At ALA Midwinter, the publisher literally gave the last galley of...
I remember when Swamplandia! came out, and I obsessively recommended and described it to people. (I must've been such a charming dinner guest.) As far as I'm concerned, Orange World and Other Stories is the pinnacle of Russell's stylistic and imaginative achievement thus far. Each of her tales is so vivid and slightly askew. With a central fantastic conceit played out in an insistently realistic world (not necessarily our world, mind you, but a realistic one)--often melding contexts with which h...
I liked "The Tornado Auction" and the title story, didn't care much for the rest. I thought her two earlier collections were more interesting, with more charm and magic.
I’m not sure exactly what is going on in Karen Russell’s brain, but if I could get a little of that in my morning coffee I’m pretty sure the world would paint itself over in ultraviolet. She is on another wavelength entirely and it is a strange, brilliant, and wonderful place.Russell is already known for her short stories, Orange World being her third collection and having had work appear in everything from The New Yorker to Zoetrope to The Best American Short Stories.The eight stories in this n...
This is a fantasy/supernatural/magic realism short story about a new mother and her fears. It can be nominated for this year Hugo.This is a story of a woman, who while not exactly young is the first time mother. She is afraid to lose her child and has a deal with a devil to protect the child. She is not the only one. After the birth, the devil demand a daily breast-feeding, exhausting the mother.It can be seen as an allusion of post-partum depression or more general, a fear that anything can hur...
I loved how different and interesting each of these stories are. They have a quirk they exploit or central premise that just really pushes the boundaries with realism in fiction, some more blatantly than others. I just enjoyed that pivot with each new story, always anticipating how Russell would surprise me next. I also find these kinds of stories to be far more engaging than her more realist novel/work.
Disclaimer: I am an avid Karen Russell stan. In fact, I would go as far to say that she is my favorite contemporary author. There is truly no one in the literary world that does quite what she does, and quite as well. "Orange World and Other Stories" is a collection of seven parable-like stories that juxtapose the supernatural world with societal familiarity. This connection manifests differently within each separate narrative; however, the author's style, as it pertains to sentence construction...
