I first encountered Karen Russell when I was a student, hunting for short-story writers in the library. Finding a copy of her debut collection St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, which was longlisted for the 2007 Guardian first book award, I took it home on a whim. With some books you begin a relationship with an author that will continue hungrily through everything they write. Russell’s writing inhabits its own universe, with metaphor and simile taking us to strange new places; we are led by the hand and find ourselves completely submerged, only later to come to, groggily, in our own world. In Russell’s second collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, women are silkworms and dead presidents live in the bodies of horses. In her novel Swamplandia! the Floridian swamps teem with alligator wrestlers; in her novella Sleep Donation, sleep is a sought-after commodity. Orange World is Russell’s third collection of short stories and it contains all her trademark signs of weirdness: a boy falls in love with a bog girl found preserved in the ground, a land on the watery edge of apocalypse is explored by a woman in a gondola, tornadoes are harnessed and sold at auction like cattle. The worlds of the stories are entirely convincing, small pockets in which it is possible to become lost.
Orange World demonstrates how Russell's attention to the tricky craft of short story writing has paid off
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