Karen Russell

Your browser does not support the audio element. On this episode, we share a “Literary Arts: The Archive Project,” exclusive: a collaboration with Oregon Symphony, featuring their Open Music program. Open Music is a new concert series in which composers featured in the classical subscription season offer a window into their spirit and creative process through an evening of music and conversation at an intimate venue in Portland.

The Chattanooga State Humanities Department’s Writers@Work program is pleased to welcome Pulitzer Prize-finalist Karen Russell to Chattanooga for a week-long celebration of her short story collection Orange World, March 29-31. The Writers@Work (W@W) series celebrates Southern literature by integrating the work of selected authors into the curriculum of the...

Karen Russell reads her story “The Ghost Birds,” from the October 11, 2021, issue of the magazine. Russell is the author of five books of fiction, including the story collection “Orange World,” which was published in 2019, and the novel “Swamplandia!,” a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2012. She was made a MacArthur fellow in 2013.

In “The Ghost Birds,” your story in this week’s issue, a man named Jasper takes his daughter, Starling, on a bird-watching trip. But the birds are ghosts—the story is set in the future, in the late part of this century, when various ecological crises have caused mass extinctions, and the only birds to be seen are apparitions. Why did you want to make this a father-daughter story?

Karen Faith Russell, 57, of Billings, Montana, formerly of Busby, Montana, passed away Wednesday, September 15, at St. Vincent’s Healthcare. She was born May 14, 1964 to Eugene F. Russell and Wanda M. Bites-Russell in Crow Agency Montana. Her Cheyenne name was Antelope Woman. Graveside service was held Monday, September...

Karen Russell can look at an austere, fallow landscape and see things most people miss. During a trip to the Sandhills in Nebraska, she looked beyond the endless vistas of sand dunes and prairie grass and found the germ of an idea that became “The Tornado Auction,” a short story from her collection Orange World (Vintage).

Karen Russell is one of the most inventive, immersive writers of our time. In her eight short-story collection, “Orange World,” she excavates layers upon layers of life articulated in the universe, but just out of our reach. And she takes her reader to extraordinary places as she inspects what it means to be alive in this time, and what it means to be human at all times. She plays with the intersection of the natural world and human foibles in wholly original tales that feel both sacred and fleshy.