Synopses & Reviews
From Pulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestselling author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove
Karen Russell: a gripping dust bowl epic about five characters whose
fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town
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.
Review
"In
The Antidote, Karen Russell writes indelible characters who keep
choosing messy community over silo'd righteousness, motion over despair.
She presents for inspection America's most persistent chorus of moral
self-defense, "Better them than us," and shows how it rots the minds,
hearts, and land of all who sing it. Only Karen Russell could write a
dust bowl opus with such raucous brio--
The Antidote soars with exigent joy and laugh-out-loud scenes,
with memory witches and enchanted cameras and the world's most lovable
sentient scarecrow. It's magic, a book doing this big work and also
making it propulsive, eminently readable. Russell has rendered with soul
and urgency the vast inexpressible ache at the heart of American
gratitude." Kaveh Akbar, author of
Martyr!
About the Author
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, a
Guggenheim Fellowship, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has
received two National Magazine Awards for Fiction, the Shirley Jackson
Award, the 2023 Bottari Lattes Grinzane prize, the 2024 Mary McCarthy
Award, and was selected for the National Book Foundation's "5 under 35"
prize 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'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.