Karen Russell is the author of five books of fiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. She is a MacArthur Fellow, was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She has received two National Magazine Awards for Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Bottari Lattes Grinzane prize, Bard College’s Mary McCarthy Award, and was selected for the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 honor and The New Yorker‘s “20 under 40” list (she is now decisively over 40). She has taught literature and creative writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the University of California-Irvine, Williams College, Columbia University, and Bryn Mawr College, and was the Endowed Chair of Texas State University’s MFA program. She serves on the board of Street Books, a mobile-library for people living outdoors. Born and raised in Miami, Florida, she now lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband, son, and daughter. Her latest novel is The Antidote.
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Karen Russell
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The Antidote: A Novel
"The Antidote" opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust bowl drought but beneath its own violent histories. "The Antidote" follows a "Prairie Witch," whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples’ memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate.
Russell's novel is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. "The Antidote" echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.
