![]() In “The Bad Graft,” a young couple from Pennsylvania have decided to run away together on their first date we meet them in the California desert. Someone or something is always transforming in a Russell story, and characters are constantly on the move, often seeking escape from their grim circumstances. He snips their hamstrings to prevent the bodies from rising and taking on grotesque new forms. In “Black Corfu,” a real village off the coast of Croatia is the home to an unreal situation - a doctor who operates on corpses underground. Russell grounds much of her work in places we can recognize, like a terrifyingly believable postapocalyptic Florida, where children attend school in wrecked cruise liners. Russell ’06SOA, who was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2012, is known as a master of the surreal and the macabre, and her ability to conjure frightening worlds is again on display here. As a collection, it is nothing short of exhilarating. Rather, the eight fantastical stories gathered here are inventive and richly imagined, empathetic and often sly. Yet Orange World, Russell’s fifth book and her third collection of short fiction, is hardly gimmicky. A woman pricks her finger on a Joshua tree and becomes possessed by the plant’s spirit. ![]() A teenage boy finds a two-thousand-year-old girl preserved in a bog and falls in love. Distilled to their premises, Karen Russell’s stories sound absurd: A grizzled farmer retires after a career spent raising tornadoes as crops. ![]()
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