Vampires in the Lemon Grove

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 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.  

ReviewAdvance Praise for Vampires in the Lemon Grove
“Vampires in the Lemon Grove shows Ms. Russell more in control of her craft than ever…Ms. Russell deftly combines elements of the weird and supernatural with acute psychological realism; elements of the gothic with dry, contemporary humor. From apparent influences as disparate as George Saunders, Saki, Stephen King, Carson McCullers and Joy Williams, she has fashioned a quirky, textured voice that is thoroughly her own: lyrical and funny, fantastical and meditative…Underscores her fecund and constantly surprising storytelling gifts…In these tales Ms. Russell combines careful research with minutely imagined details and a wonderfully vital sleight of hand to create narratives that possess both the resonance of myth and the immediacy of something new.”
            —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Hilarious, exquisite, first-rate…It’s hard not to reflect on the origins of this wildly talented young writer’s ideas…A grim, stupendous magic is at work in these stories…Her work has a velocity and trajectory that is little less than dazzling and a tough, enveloping, exhilarating voice that cannot be equaled.”
            —The New York Times Book Review (cover review)
 
“An eight-tale adrenaline-delivery system packed with long-married, problem-beset monsters, abandoned children whose lives are in dire peril, teens with creepy sixth senses, and masseuses with inexplicable healing powers…Darkly inventive, demonically driven narratives set in the author’s inimitable imaginative disturbia.”
            —Elle
 
“Delightfully weird…moving.”
            —Esquire
 
“Consistently arresting…startling…profound…Even more impressive than Russell’s critically acclaimed novel.” 
            —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Russell doesn’t work small. She’s a world builder, and the stranger the better…Russell’s great gift—along with her antic imagination—is her ability to create whole landscapes and lifetimes of strangeness within the confines of a short story.”
            —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Russell returns to the story form with renewed daring, leading us again into uncharted terrain, though as fantastic as the predicaments she imagines are, the emotions couldn’t be truer to life…Mind-blowing, mythic, macabre, hilarious.”
            —Booklist (starred review)
“The offbeat lusciousness of [Swamplandia] seems to be repeated in Russell’s new story collection…Don’t miss.” 
            —Library Journal
“Karen Russell casts another spell with her otherworldly collection of stories…Is she a Southern Gothicist? A parabolist? A moralist? Do her stories expand upon old histories, or create new, fantastical explanations for them? But the stories, without ever confining themselves to one genre or tradition, speak for themselves.”
            —Bullett Magazine
 

And Praise for Swamplandia!
“Ms. Russell is one in a million…A suspenseful, deeply haunted book.” 
—The New York Times
“[Russell] has thrown the whole circus of her heart onto the page, safety nets be damned….Russell has deep and true talents.” 
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Vividly worded, exuberant in characterization, the novel is a wild ride…This family, wrestling with their desires and demons…will lodge in the memories of anyone lucky enough to read Swamplandia!” 
            —The New York Times Book Review (cover review)
 
“I can’t recall the last time I came across a character who shines as brightly as Ava, or a first novel that made such a rich and lasting impression.” 
            —Carl Hiaasen
 
About the AuthorKaren Russell, a native of Miami, won the 2012 National Magazine Award for fiction, and her first novel, Swamplandia! (2011), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is a graduate of the Columbia MFA program, a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2012 Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. She lives in Philadelphia.