In her novel Swamplandia! the Floridian swamps teem with alligator wrestlers in her novella Sleep Donation, sleep is a sought-after commodity. In Russell’s second collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, women are silkworms and dead presidents live in the bodies of horses. Russell’s writing inhabits its own universe, with metaphor and simile taking us to strange new places we are led by the hand and find ourselves completely submerged, only later to come to, groggily, in our own world. With some books you begin a relationship with an author that will continue hungrily through everything they write. Finding a copy of her debut collection St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, which was longlisted for the 2007 Guardian first book award, I took it home on a whim. I first encountered Karen Russell when I was a student, hunting for short-story writers in the library.
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