In the brilliant and hilarious title story a new mother desperate to ensure her baby’s safety strikes a deal with the devil to protect her baby. In ‘The Prospectors’ two opportunistic young women fleeing the Depression strike out for new territory, but find themselves fighting for their lives. In ‘The Bad Graft’, a couple on a road trip stop in Joshua Tree National Park, where the spirit of a giant tree accidentally infects the young woman, their fates becoming permanently entangled. These exuberant, unforgettable stories showcase Karen Russell’s comedic and imaginative talent for creating outlandish predicaments that uncannily mirror our inner lives. ‘A rare combination of literary brilliance and unbridled entertainment’ Mark Haddon For lovers of excellent writing, this book should not be missed.‘I loved Orange World… a collection of short stories in which demons live in drains, bog women come back from the dead and trees can grow inside the human body’ Daisy Johnson, New Statesman BOOK OF THE YEAR Without a doubt, Orange World and Other Stories is destined for a similar fate.
Winner of numerous awards and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Russell is already the bestselling author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. Having received her MFA from Columbia, Russell has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. Underlying all of this is the exquisite beauty of Russell’s sentences, which will repeatedly surprise readers with their imagery and masterful language. In “Bog Girl: A Romance,” another mother makes the same remarks about her son’s new, albeit dead, girlfriend that mothers around the world have made. In “Orange World,” a mother is desperate to protect her infant son after the pain of repeated miscarriage. Furthermore, despite their surreal nature, Russell grounds each story in human experience, both poignant and hilarious in turn.
Russell ties these seemingly disparate tales together with a pervading theme of alienation: from the past, from family, from nature. However, Orange World and Other Stories is so much more than fresh plots.
These are just a few of the brilliantly inventive premises of Karen Russell’s wonderful new collection of short stories. A woman strikes a bargain to breastfeed the devil to protect her unborn son. During a nostalgic visit to a tornado auction, an old man impulsively buys and rears one last tornado as he reviews his life choices. A young woman unwittingly becomes the human host of a Joshua tree, while her boyfriend struggles to understand this startling change in their budding relationship. A young man falls in love with a 2,000-year-old girl he discovers in a Northern European peat bog.
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