Short stories by Karen Russell
Karen Russell won the 2012 and the 2018 National Magazine Award for fiction, and her first novel, Swamplandia! (2011), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, winner of the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, and one of The New York Times’ Ten Best Books of 2011. She has received a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim award and is a former fellow of the NYPL Cullman Center and the American Academy in Berlin. She graduated summa cum laude from Northwestern University and received her MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Born and raised in Miami, Florida, she now lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and son. She is the Endowed Chair of Texas State University’s MFA program, where she teaches in the fall semesters.
Listing 10 stories.
An unorthodox doctor must find a way to exonerate himself from slanderous rumors circulating the island he and his family call home.
When a house dog grows depressed alongside her owner, the dog escapes into the woods and must learn how to survive on her own four feet.
A lonely, grieving man attends a divorce party and ruminates on the state of his life and affairs. He becomes inspired by a beautiful pet tortoise and finally finds the emotional release that he has been seeking since he suffered a tragic loss for which he blames himself.
A girl and her human pack are sent by their werewolf parents to a school to learn to assimilate into human culture, but not all of them adopt the lifestyle.
A young couple in their 20s set off on a spontaneous trip to the American West that leads them to Joshua Tree, where the girl is possessed by the spirit of a tree, forcing the couple to renegotiate their impulsive relationship.
A teenage boy falls in love with a two-thousand-year-old girl that he discovers preserved in a nearby bog. But not everyone approves of their blossoming relationship, especially not the boy's mother.
A bunch of small-town kids run into a scarecrow—or what they think, at first, is a scarecrow.
Two girls on the run use their wits and charm to steal from wealthy patrons. On their way to yet another party, they make a wrong turn and end up in the company of ghosts who are unaware they were previously killed by a building collapse.
A bright teenager is forced to spend his summer at work back home in an Australian coastal town after his mother loses her job. When he finds a mysterious cache of objects that seagulls have stolen from people's futures, things start to take a turn for the better.
An aging vampire, who can no longer turn into a bat, and his wife, who still can, have been cursed with immortality and a thirst that nothing, not even blood, can sate. Their search for relief has brought them to a lemon grove in southern Italy, where the fruit satiates them for a few hours, but the hunger still remains and is slowly driving them apart.