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Right or wrong? All Rights Florida loomed large in Russell’s earliest work. A woman strikes a bargain to breastfeed the devil to protect her unborn son. Russell’s particular gift lies in taking themes that are close to universal and presenting them in stories whose strangeness comes to seem entirely natural, even necessary. Once in a while, a story will try to give you clues about how to approach it embedded in the story itself. While a novel might sprawl off in any number of directions, short stories tend to be more schematic, by virtue of their tightly controlled brevity. “In retrospect,” Russell told The Chicago Tribune in 2014, reflecting on the landscape of her upbringing, “there’s a way in South Florida in which the natural and the artificial are just endlessly mixed up together.” Which is actually a reasonable description of fiction as well, with its mix of artifice and realism. In “Bog Girl: A Romance,” a 15-year-old boy on a remote Irish island unearths the eerily preserved corpse of an Iron Age murder victim in a peat bog, a girl of about his own age who perished some 2,000 years ago. When Rae attends a support group for new mothers, she struggles to find a way to tell them what’s wrong: “‘I’m having a hard time with night feedings,’ Rae finally says.”), The anxieties of our age pervade Russell’s book. “The Tornado Auction” — deeply affecting, exquisitely written and arguably the masterpiece of this collection — is set in a version of reality where storms are bred for sale, which is to say, a reality where we make our own weather in a manner only slightly more personal than the way we contribute to climate change. South Florida is gone, but its strangeness remains. Russell is scared, too, but her new book stands as a reminder that worrying about the future and grieving it are not the same thing. Karen Russell titles her darkly funny fairy tale “The Bad Graft” because what follows is a doomed romance, with the tree forever tugging at Angie to return to the desert. Wurman's tornadoes were raised for demolition purposes, but he had been retired for 15 years. These are just a few of the brilliantly inventive premises of Karen Russell’s wonderful new collection of short stories. TheAtlantic.com Copyright (c) 2020 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. It isn’t the only American state with deranging humidity levels and primordial swamps populated by giant predatory reptiles, but of all 50 states Florida arguably does the best impression of a fever dream. It’s the state with the mermaids, the state where you have to drive north to get to the South, and I’m surely not the first to notice that it’s either the point of origin or the long-term home of several of our most original short story writers: Lauren Groff of Gainesville, Laura van den Berg of Orlando, Kelly Link and Karen Russell of Miami. If you’ve ever endured a certain kind of bad date, this will resonate. AT THE SALE BARN. “Compared with the warm and expansive desert soil,” it laments, “the human body is a cul-de-sac.”. Russell brings plenty of surface-level absurdity to Orange World. There certainly is some truth to that, though only as much as there is to the idea that Stephen King’s novels are terrifying because Maine is kooky, or that Flannery O’Connor’s fiction is so disturbing because she grew up in Georgia. A May-December relationship that was probably doomed from the start, the romance between. This is no small thing. He buys a storm on a whim, takes it home and finds himself overcome with joy in the roar of its winds: “But that sound spiraling out, I’d forgotten how a roar like that can fill you up entirely.

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