Visiting Author – Karen Russell – The Antidote

Join us on Tuesday, April 1st at 5:30 as we welcome Pulitzer finalist Karen Russell! She will be presenting her new novel The Antidote, “a gripping dust bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town.” You don’t want to miss this exciting opportunity to meet with the author of the bestseller Swamplandia!, and hear what went into the making of her exciting new novel. We’ll see you there!

Pre-Order a copy of The Antidote HERE

About the Book:
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.

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, was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and named 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.

Praise for The Antidote:
“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!

“The Antidote is an achingly gorgeous book about dust, memory, basketball, murder, yearning, photography, and the way the land holds both the memory of what went before and the dreams of what may come. Karen Russell is one of our most humane and generous writers; this book is as profound as it is wonderfully strange.” — Lauren Groff, author of The Vaster Wilds

“This novel swept me up and carried me away, even while somehow burying me, and digging up something about the story of this country I didn’t know I needed to know. As with all of Russell’s work, heaviness and levity are always kept in balance, and so I was lifted even while being devastated by the book’s many brutal truths and stark beauty. I’d already considered Russell’s vivid and inventive imagination to be endless, but here exploring a history of Nebraska we get an unearthing of this country’s still relatively untold origin story, the part about its original people, and the cost paid in order that this country might be formed. Finishing the book I felt completely covered in the forgotten dust of what too few look back on, with rare clarity, not to mention the intricate braid of narratives masterfully woven here. The Antidote is one, for an all too poisoned American narrative about land and family and belonging.” — Tommy Orange, author of Wandering Stars