Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell

I hope they would I know I'd like to.Ĭonsider the title story, in which two vampires have installed themselves in a lemon grove in Italy. I found myself wondering whether more writers, given the same access, would let themselves write so wildly and freely. I admired the access that she seems to have to the dense and dreamy material that lies deep inside the brain. 'Original' is a word that gets applied to books as frequently as a 20-percent-off sticker at Barnes & Noble, but in this case it's accurate. I'm well aware that it sounds like the plot of no other short story on earth, because Russell's work is original. I know, you're probably thinking: 'Dead presidents reincarnated as horses? Oh, come on, Meg, that sounds like the plot of so many short stories.' Hayes, a skewbald pinto, frantically licks the palm of a girl in a secret code that he's worked out, revealing his true identity and asking her to alert the authorities. In one of the eight stories in Karen Russell's new collection, a group of dead presidents has been reincarnated as horses. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Russell joins The Daily Circuit to discuss her latest collection of short stories.Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Vampires In The Lemon Grove Subtitle Stories Author Karen Russell With those vampires, I really did want to try to think through our mortal commitments to one another from the perspective of an eternal being - what would ''til death do us part' look like from the everlasting vantage of a vampire?

So to narrate a story from within a monster's skin - it's a chance to consider how the terror originates from within and spills outward.

And also exiled from love and community, hunted and hated, etc. Monsters are often slaves to ungovernable appetites and desires, they are powerless over their own impulses, they are brutally violent. I think that the figure of the monster tends to function as a funhouse mirror for human nature, those facets of ourselves that we cannot admit to our conscious awareness - that's how I explain my own attraction and repulsion to monster-tales, anyhow. She spoke to the Library of Congress about why she uses magical realism in her writing: Karen Russell's latest collection of short stories is 'Vampires in the Lemon Grove.' She's a MacArthur Fellow - the grant colloquially known as a 'genius grant' - and the foundation praised her 'haunting yet comic tales,' which 'blend fantastical elements with psychological realism and classic themes of transformation and redemption.'

Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell