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From the celebrated twenty-nine-year-old author of the everywhere-heralded short-story collection St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves ("How I wish these were my own words, instead of the breakneck demon writer Karen Russell's . . . Run for your life. This girl is on fire"- Los Angeles Times Book Review ) comes a blazingly original debut novel that takes us back to the swamps of the Florida Everglades, and introduces us to Ava Bigtree, an unforgettable young heroine.

The Bigtree alligator-wrestling dynasty is in decline, and Swamplandia!, their island home and gator-wrestling theme park, formerly #1 in the region, is swiftly being encroached upon by a fearsome and sophisticated competitor called the World of Darkness. Ava's mother, the park's indomitable headliner, has just died; her sister, Ossie, has fallen in love with a spooky character known as the Dredgeman, who may or may not be an actual ghost; and her brilliant big brother, Kiwi, who dreams of becoming a scholar, has just defected to the World of Darkness in a last-ditch effort to keep their family business from going under. Ava's father, affectionately known as Chief Bigtree, is AWOL; and that leaves Ava, a resourceful but terrified thirteen, to manage ninety-eight gators and the vast, inscrutable landscape of her own grief.

Against a backdrop of hauntingly fecund plant life animated by ancient lizards and lawless hungers, Karen Russell has written an utterly singular novel about a family's struggle to stay afloat in a world that is inexorably sinking. An arrestingly beautiful and inventive work from a vibrant new voice in fiction.

 

 

Q: Swamplandia! is the Orange New Writers Book of the Month - what does it mean to you for your debut novel to be selected?

A: I'm thrilled and really honored. It's an incredible group to keep company with. And at a time when there is such a crushing volume of stuff published, and so much competing for a reader's attention, I think it's especially great that the Orange New Writers program is giving first-time novelists this platform. When I was in the middle of writing Swamplandia!, I remember thinking that it was so weird that nobody was going to publish it, let alone read it, so I feel especially grateful to get to find a readership in the UK.

Q: Who are your literary influences?

A: Oh, a complete grabbag--Joy Williams, Virginia Woolf, Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Denis Johnson, Ben Marcus, Kevin Brockmeier, Wallace Stevens, Kelly Link, Jack London, Stephen King, Junot Diaz, Edgar Allan Poe...

Q: Many of your narratives are seen through the eyes of children, do you see Swamplandia! as a coming of age story?

A: I definitely do - certainly the Bigtree siblings emerge from the swamp as entirely new creatures. But I think of Swamplandia! as a coming of age story for not just Ava and Kiwi but for their entire family - everybody is making an important transition together. Everyone develops his or her own strategy for adapting to the death of Hilola Bigtree, their mother and headliner. They have to find a new way to tell the story of their family in the wake of her passing.

And I think you could make the case that the state of Florida is "coming of age"--we are in the throes of a prolonged and violent adolescence where real estate wars and developers have drained and nearly destroyed the Everglades, which today are less than a third of their original size. "Coming of age" usually has positive connotations, I suppose, but in the case of South Florida, we seem hellbent on pushing a fragile, finite ecosystem to its limits, in the age of strip malls and urban sprawl. I grew up in Miami, where the coastlines are revised hourly and the downtown skyline is in near-constant flux-and because that was the backdrop against which I myself "came of age," I'm sure that the idea of humans and their landscapes metamorphosing into new forms together was imprinted on me early on.

Q: What would you recommend as essential summer reads to Orange Book Club fans?

A: I really love Heidi Julavitz' "The Vanishers." I read it and it immediately became one of my favorite books. It's about two warring psychics, although the book is so strange and so deeply haunted by every shade of loss that it feels reductive to say it's "about" any one thing--better just to read it!

And Brad Morrow's novel "The Diviners" and his story collection "The Unninocent," combine some old-fashioned hair-raising storytelling with black humor and a real empathy for freak and witches and orphans. He's a beautiful writer.

Q: Anything else you'd like to add?

A: Thank you so much again for making Swamplandia! the book of the month. At the very least, I think it might be interesting reading if you're planning a trip to Florida.