Karen Russell

George Saunders is huge for me, of course.

Karen Russell, Kelly Link, Carmen Maria Machado, Charles Yu, just like absolutely worshipped those writers and the work that they do.

And so like really kind of kept returning to different stories in their books for kind of how to balance these things, right? Like Kelly Link talks about the speculative, talks about inserting something speculative into an otherwise character-driven or literary story as a kind of intensifier.

And I think that's right and I think that's such a fun way of looking at it that you put these things in and I think you can really, you can intensify the dread but you can also intensify the joy.

It was speculative only in that it was set in the slight future, but everything that happened in it was grounded in reality.

Um, and The Antidote by Karen Russell, like there is, I think there is a corner of the literary world and of awards committees certainly that place value on climate fiction because this is a very, you know, salient social concern, and they're looking at fiction that addresses the concerns of the day, and like that's totally valid.

It's just a tough sell for readers right now, I think.

This next one is, I've been staring at this book since it came out, since we heard the title and the synopsis.

I guess what I've been given people recently that they wouldn't necessarily consider are short stories, you know, like short stories by authors who have novels.

So like if you read Antidote, I really recommend people go back and read Karen Russell's short stories because she's a master at that.

George Saunders has a new book out that's a novel, but he's a master of short stories.

So I've been giving people kind of some back catalog.

...

the Karen Russell book from last year, The Antidote.

The Antidote, yeah.

Could look into something like that.