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Book Reviewed by: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.
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
Full Review
(585 words)
(Reviewed by Lisa Butts).
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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