April 15, 2013 Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2012 (a year in which no prize was awarded), talks with Chapter 16 about her new collection of short stories, Vampires in the Lemon Grove. In her fiction, Russell toys with the line between fantasy and reality, and she is wary of fantasy’s association with young-adult novels.
“Vampires in the Lemon Grove,” the collection’s title story, follows an immortal vampire couple as they struggle through marriage—a commitment that, for them, is truly and actually eternal. In this interview, Russell discusses her time in Germany, human mortality, the pros and cons of finding a bootleg copy of her own book in New York, and how writing is a delicate act of distortion and illusion.
To read a transcript of the interview, click here.
