Karen Russell -- Vampires in the Lemon Grove -- Gables

Start: Feb 16 2013 8:00 pm

From the author of the New York Times bestseller Swamplandia! — a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize — come a a magical new collection of stories -- Vampires in the Lemon Grove (Knopf, $24.95) -- that showcases Karen Russell’s gifts at their inimitable best. A dejected teenager discovers that the universe is communicating with him through talismanic objects left behind in a seagull’s nest. A community of girls held captive in a silk factory slowly transmute into human silkworms, spinning delicate threads from their own bellies, and escape by seizing the means of production for their own revolutionary ends. And in the collection’s marvelous title story—an unforgettable parable of addiction and appetite, mortal terror and mortal love—two vampires in a sun-drenched lemon grove try helplessly to slake their thirst for blood. Karen Russell is one of today’s most celebrated and vital writers—honored in The New Yorker’s list of the twenty best writers under the age of forty, Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists, and the National Book Foundation’s five best writers under the age of thirty-five. Her wondrous new work displays a young writer of superlative originality and invention coming into the full range and scale of her powers.