Swamplandia!

Fülszöveg

PRAISE FOR KAREN RUSSELL'S
"Brilliant, funny, original . . . Also creepy and sinister . . . Karen Russell's Swamplandia! is every bit as good as her short stories promised it would be. This book will not leave my mind." —STEPHEN KING
"This was the first time I've read Karen Russell's work, and I was dazzled . . . Passages of this fine novel call to mind Conrad, Garcia Márquez, and even Judy Blume . . . 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
"A wonderfully fertile novel by an unfairly talented writer." —JOSEPH O'NEILL
"Karen Russell's worlds, like her protagonists, are fierce and wondrous and hilarious and heartbreaking, and Swamplandia! features everything a reader could want, from bears with bad rhythm to Live Chicken Thursdays to as visceral and dazzling a portrait of south Florida's now almost destroyed wilderness as you're likely to read. But mostly... Tovább

Fülszöveg

PRAISE FOR KAREN RUSSELL'S
"Brilliant, funny, original . . . Also creepy and sinister . . . Karen Russell's Swamplandia! is every bit as good as her short stories promised it would be. This book will not leave my mind." —STEPHEN KING
"This was the first time I've read Karen Russell's work, and I was dazzled . . . Passages of this fine novel call to mind Conrad, Garcia Márquez, and even Judy Blume . . . 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
"A wonderfully fertile novel by an unfairly talented writer." —JOSEPH O'NEILL
"Karen Russell's worlds, like her protagonists, are fierce and wondrous and hilarious and heartbreaking, and Swamplandia! features everything a reader could want, from bears with bad rhythm to Live Chicken Thursdays to as visceral and dazzling a portrait of south Florida's now almost destroyed wilderness as you're likely to read. But mostly it's a gorgeous and wrenching portrait of sibling love in all its helpless and furious and panicked indefatigability, and of one girl's determination to do what she can to hold what's left of her family together." —JIM SHEPARD
"I would cross even the most crocodile- and yellow-fever-infested swamp just to spend an hour with Russell's prose. She has an imagination like Calvino, an ear like Tennyson, a heart like Carson McCullers, an obsei-ving intelligence like Marianne Moore; what I really mean to say is she is a strange and wonderful vn-iter like none other I know." —RIVKA GALCHEN
"Lavishly imagined and spectacularly crafted . . . Ravishing, elegiac, funny, and brilliantly inquisitive, Russell's archetypal swamp saga tells a mystical yet rooted tale of three innocents who come of age through trials of water, fire, and air."
—BOOKLIST (starred review)
"A love song to paradise and innocence lost. This wildly imaginative debut novel delivers."
—LIBRARY JOURNAL (starred review)
U.S.A. $24-95 Canada $27.95
F
rom the celebrated twenty-nine-year-old author of the everywhere-heralded short-story collection St. Lucj's Home for Girls Raised bj Wolves ("How I wish these were my own
_ words, instead of the breakneck
demon writer Karen Russell's . . . Run for your life. This girl is on fire"—Los Angeles Times Book Review) comes a blazingly original debut novel that takes us back to the swamps of the Florida Everglades, and introduces us to Ava Bigtree, an unforgettable young heroine.
The Bigtree alligator-vkrestling dynasty is in decline, and Swamplandia!, their island home and gator-wrestling theme park, formerly #I in the region, is swiftly being encroached upon by a fearsome and sophisticated competitor called the World of Darkness. Ava's mother, the park's indomitable headliner, has just died; her sister, Ossie, has fallen in love wdth a spooky character known as the Dredgeman, who may or may not be an actual ghost; and her brilliant big brother, Kiwi, who dreams of becoming a scholar, has just defected to the World of Darkness in a last-ditch effort to keep their family business from going under. Ava's father, affectionately known as Chief Bigtree, is AWOL, and that leaves Ava, a resourceful but terrified thirteen, to manage ninety-eight gators and the vast, inscrutable landscape of her own grief.
Against a backdrop of hauntingly fecund plant life animated by ancient lizards and lawless hungers, Karen Russell has written an utterly singular novel about a family's struggle to stay afloat in a world that is inexorably sinking. An arrestingly beautiful and inventive work from a vibrant new voice in fiction.
Karen Russell, a native of Miami, has been featured in The New Yorker's debut fiction issue and on The New Yorker's 20 Under 40 list, and was chosen as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. In 2009, she received the 5 Under 35 award from the National Book Foundation. Three of her short stories have been selected for the Best American Short Stories volumes. She is currently writer-in-residence at Bard College.
Karen Russell's St. Lucj's Home for Girls Raised bj Wolves is available in Vintage paperback.
Also available from Random House Audio
Jacket image by Luthev Daniels Bradley © Blue Lantern Studio / Corbis Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson Vissza