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Critics' Opinion:
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First Published:
May 2019, 288 pages
Paperback:
May 2020, 288 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Lisa Butts
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A stunning new collection of short fiction that showcases Karen Russell's extraordinary, irresistible gifts of language and imagination.
Karen Russell's comedic genius and mesmerizing talent for creating outlandish predicaments that uncannily mirror our inner in lives is on full display in these eight exuberant, arrestingly vivid, unforgettable stories. In "Bog Girl", a revelatory story about first love, a young man falls in love with a two thousand year old girl that he's extracted from a mass of peat in a Northern European bog. In "The Prospectors," two opportunistic young women fleeing the depression strike out for new territory, and find themselves fighting for their lives. In the brilliant, hilarious title story, a new mother desperate to ensure her infant's safety strikes a diabolical deal, agreeing to breastfeed the devil in exchange for his protection.
The landscape in which these stories unfold is a feral, slippery, purgatorial space, bracketed by the void—yet within it Russell captures the exquisite beauty and tenderness of ordinary life. Orange World is a miracle of storytelling from a true modern master.
Excerpted from "The Prospectors"
The entire ride would take eleven minutes. That was what the boy had promised us, the boy who never showed.
To be honest, I hadn't expected to find the chairlift. Not through the maze of old-growth firs and not in the dwindling light. Not without our escort. A minute earlier, I'd been on the brink of suggesting that we give up and hike back to the logging road. But at the peak of our despondency we saw it: the lift, rising like a mirage out of the timber woods, its four dark cables striping the red sunset. Chairs were floating up the mountainside, forty feet above our heads. Empty chairs, upholstered in ice, swaying lightly in the wind. Sailing beside them, just as swiftly and serenely, a hundred chairs came down the mountain. As if a mirror were malfunctioning, each chair separating from a buckle-bright double. Nobody was manning the loading station; if we wanted to take the lift we'd have to do it alone. I squeezed Clara's hand.
A party awaited us at ...
Karen Russell has a tremendous gift for crafting uncanny, through-the-looking glass worlds that are so much like our own, with a surrealist edge...Even if you're not ordinarily attracted to books with supernatural elements, Russell is so effective in humanizing this theme...continued
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(Reviewed by Lisa Butts).
Louise Erdrich
A feast of invention and a fun house of surprising wisdom, Orange World contains a ghost-ship lodge, tourist trade in a post-apocalyptic drowned city, a tornado farm, a local succubus. Karen Russell moves from the farcical to the forbidden with tender conviction. Don't miss this book of marvels!
Korčula is a Croatian island in the Adriatic Sea off the Dalmation coast, and the setting of Karen Russell's story "Black Corfu" from her story collection Orange World. It's the second most populated island in the Adriatic (after Krk), and it has a long, storied history of being occupied by various superpowers reaching back to the ancient world.
The earliest known inhabitants of Korčula were the Illyrians, a group of Indo-European tribes who lived across the western Balkans and subsisted on farming and fishing. The island was colonized by Greeks in the 6th century BC, who called it Black Corfu—Black for its dense woods, and Corfu for their island of origin. Greeks and Illyrians coexisted in separate areas of the ...
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