Vampires in the Lemon Grove: Stories [Kindle Edition] Author: Karen Russell | Language: English | ISBN:
B00957T2TY | Format: PDF, EPUB
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From the author of the New York Times best seller Swamplandia!—a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize—a magical new collection of stories 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. A massage therapist discovers she has the power to heal by manipulating the tattoos on a war veteran’s lower torso. When a group of boys stumble upon a mutilated scarecrow bearing an uncanny resemblance to the missing classmate they used to torment, an ordinary tale of high school bullying becomes a sinister fantasy of guilt and atonement. In a family’s disastrous quest for land in the American West, the monster is the human hunger for acquisition, and the victim is all we hold dear. 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 TheNew 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.
This ebook edition includes a Reading Group Guide.
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- File Size: 1396 KB
- Print Length: 258 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0307957233
- Publisher: Vintage (February 12, 2013)
- Sold by: Random House LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00957T2TY
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,520 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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- #9
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction > Short Stories - #10
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Contemporary Fiction > Short Stories - #12
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Short Stories > United States
The title story of Karen Russell's new collection achieved an unusual distinction: appearing not only in the 2008 volume of THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES, but also in the 2008 volume of THE YEAR'S BEST FANTASY AND HORROR. It's not hard to see why. Like the other seven stories here, "Vampires in the Lemon Grove" captures a particular slice of human experience so distinctively that genre boundaries are revealed anew as the pointless distraction they are. The truly remarkable thing about Russell is not that she merges "genre" and "literary"-- many writers do-- but that she transmutes her story ideas, often peculiar even by genre standards, from the stuff of whimsical frivolity into melancholy or downright tragic portraits of our best and worst impulses. This makes her fiction, like that of George Saunders or Sherman Alexie, at once hilarious and heartbreaking. As one character puts it, "Yeah, that's pretty funny. Except that, I mean, it sounds really awful, too..."
"Vampires in the Lemon Grove" is perhaps the least unusual of these stories, simply because the vampire is so overexposed a figure that even the most refreshing take on it feels a little old hat. What we have here is a reformed vampire named Clyde (ha?) who, having discovered with the help of his wife, also a vampire, that drinking blood doesn't help and that many of the old superstitions are just that, has taken to lemon juice as a humane substitute. But when Clyde's wife suggests it may be time for a change, old habits threaten to reassert themselves. Lacking the emotional intensity of some of the later stories, this is nonetheless a clever meditation on the appeal of bad behavior and the precariousness of redemption.
Deep Breadth. An oxymoron, sure, but this 8-pack of not-so-short stories has it in spades. We have send-ups of vampire stories, Gothic Old West stories, contemporary stories, horror stories, humorous stories -- everything but haiku, practically. And, if your thing is "writers' writers," you've come to the right lemon grove. Karen Russell's best friends are words. She plays around with language, with sentences, with unexpected words, and she exults in it. Sometimes you just pause and say, "Nice."
But what about the stories, plot-wise, you ask? Well, it's like this. Some are more satisfying than others. They're meaty stories, for one. Most of them are in the neighborhood of 30 pages, so when they're not working they become a slog. When that happens, you feel Russell could use a touch of Maxwell Perkins' scissors. But that's a quibble, over all, because mostly you don't notice the pages flipping by. Description and character are Russell's forte. And weirdness. Together they keep things moving.
"Vampires in the Lemon Grove" has some fun with the sitting-duck genre of vampire lit -- an earth well scorched by the TWILIGHT series. This vampire couple is on the wagon. No. More. Blood. Strictly sinking their teeth into lemons. And about this sun problem? Bah. These vampires wear sunglasses. Florida is safe no more. The collection gets stranger still with "Reeling for the Empire," wherein young ladies are converted into the sorority sister equivalent of silk worms in the province of Dystopia, Japan (or maybe it's one island over). Odd isn't the word for it.. "Proving Up" is a bit reminiscent of Stewart O'Nan's A PRAYER FOR THE DYING. Old West gothic. But you have to admit, it shows Russell's versatility. Even if she does use a little kid to do it (flag on the play).
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