Reading Karen Russell
If you haven't read Karen Russell, you probably should. She's about my age and a Northwestern grad, and her writing makes you carried-along happy instead of Olympic-watching jealous.
And she has a book out.
Karen first appeared in this space in May 2004 when she was Nerve blogger Strumpet22, taking the site's idea of pleasure in a more modest yet simultaneously more enjoyable direction. She found the blog mention here, and we e-mailed briefly (Go U Northwestern). We then lost touch until June 2005 when "Haunting Olivia" grabbed me in the New Yorker's Debut Fiction issue. It was a terrific story. The way it took hold, it made me think of being a kid and falling asleep a night, when you're small and the darkness starts to swim around you.
The author's name was Karen Russell, so I e-mailed her again to find out if that was her. Indeed it was. She was also knee-deep in book writing. I was going to blog about that awesomeness here, but then I lost the issue and my handle on Outlook Express, and life moved on. Until this last June, when she made it into the New Yorker again, with "Accident Brief." It was cold like a Salinger short — and like the story's plot — but descriptive with a mystery that made the chill unique. I saved the issue and planned to write here whenever the earlier issue turned up again.
And today it did. Off for a few days, I was going through the foldable boxes next to front door, crammed to the sides of the massive stereo box, and the issue turned up. Dusty but probably exactly where I'd left it. The cumulative effect of the find and the steady success in my fight against the inbox — turning up the fact I still owed a reply from many months before — sent me to Google to see if Karen had come out with a book.
Indeed she had, as St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves came out this fall. It collected the first New Yorker story and added previously unpublished others, and the reviews were great. I ordered my copy this afternoon and finally finished this post.
February 11th, 2009 at 12:10 AM
[...] on Russell, whom you may remember, in a future [...]
February 24th, 2009 at 12:15 AM
[...] Karen Russell, mentioned here a number of times in the past, mostly recently when I bought the book in December. I'd already read two of the stories in the New Yorker and loved them both. But then work [...]
August 13th, 2010 at 6:45 AM
[...] story I'd most anticipated of the magazine's "20 under 40" series. Russell is a random acquaintance of this blog, and I've been a fan of her writing since first reading it. In her [...]