I’m the author of the short story collection How to Capture Carbon, which explores how people’s lives change when touched by a bit of magic. Writing these stories helped me try to make sense of the early years of parenting when a dream-like blend of sleep deprivation, worry, and overpowering love made my life feel like a Dalí painting. I love stories and books that continue to make me feel less alone in that struggle. For me, stories that make the leap into surrealism give me both a dose of delight and highlight the real magic found in connecting with the people and places I love.
Any time I see a new story by Russell, I drop everything to step into the funny, quirky, and insightful worlds she creates. When I first read the title story of Orange World, about a woman who has made a bargain with a devil to protect her own baby, I wanted to press this book into the hands of any mother struggling with breastfeeding.
I could think of no better way to explain my experience than Russell’s description of trying to nurse a clawed, fanged, insatiable monster—along with the mix of posturing and solidarity I found within new mom’s groups and the way that loving my children connected me with my own parents.
'I loved Orange World... a collection of short stories in which demons live in drains, bog women come back from the dead and trees can grow inside the human body' Daisy Johnson, New Statesman BOOK OF THE YEAR
'A rare combination of literary brilliance and unbridled entertainment' Mark Haddon
These exuberant, unforgettable stories showcase Karen Russell's comedic and imaginative talent for creating outlandish predicaments that uncannily mirror our inner lives. In 'The Bad Graft', a couple on a road trip stop in Joshua Tree National Park, where the spirit of a giant tree accidentally infects the young woman, their fates…
I keep returning to this collection of stories when I want to get closer to the feeling that flickers between grief and love, which I’ve felt in both large ways and in the small losses that I feel as my kids get older.
Many of the mothers in Romm’s book are dying, but her unwavering attention and humor make these stories feel like a balm, not a wound. There are stories about a man who carries an egg around to test out fatherhood and about a woman planting a crop of mothers in her garden while she grieves her own.
In my own life, plenty of eggs get broken, and the garden has a mind of its own—so these stories also feel familiar, personal, and comforting.
Robin Romm's arresting and resonant stories take on the fundamental themes of the human condition: mortality, loyalty, and love. In fresh and irreverent prose, Romm captures the mo-ments before and after loss, mining the depths of grief with wit and grace.
The stories in The Mother Garden are at once vividly realistic and infused with the bizarre -- a man uses a chicken egg to test whether he is ready for fatherhood; a daughter plants a garden of mothers to replace her own; a family's ghosts literally fall through the ceiling, disrupting daily life; a woman finds her father sleeping…
Most of the books I read with my kids have animals as the main characters, but few books aimed at adults do, so I was thrilled to find these stories where wolves, vultures, and tigers provide nuanced, complex perspectives on a threatened world. I learned about love and deep ocean noise from a young whale and felt the loneliness of a polar bear who is parted from his mother, his twin, and others of his kind.
Through these mythic stories, I realized the deep strangeness that comes from losing my connection to other animals and the true pleasure of returning to my place as a creature of the world—something I felt when I became a mother and again as I read these stories.
Longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection, Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction. Finalist for the 2023 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction.
A Ms. Magazine, Bustle, Publishers Weekly, Chicago Review of Books, Debutiful, and ALTA Journal Best Book of September
An Orion Best Book of Fall
In nine stories that span the globe, What We Fed to the Manticore takes readers inside the minds of a full cast of animal narrators to understand the triumphs, heartbreaks, and complexities of the creatures that share our world.
Every time I read something by George Saunders, I’m in awe of what, for me, is his trifecta of powers: hilarious writing, fantastically creative situations, and deep compassion for his characters and their choices. This book is no exception, and I was particularly struck by The Semplica Girl Diaries, which shows what lengths a suburban dad goes to—it involves unusual, morally questionable human lawn ornaments—in order to support his daughters’ happiness.
While reading these stories, I found my sympathies shifting and unfolding from character to character, each a person whose beating heart lies just below the surface of their unusual circumstances.
**ESCAPE FROM SPIDERHEAD NOW STREAMING ON NETFLIX - STARRING CHRIS HEMSWORTH AND MILES TELLER**
The prize-winning, New York Times bestselling short story collection from the internationally bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo
'The best book you'll read this year' New York Times
'Dazzlingly surreal stories about a failing America' Sunday Times
WINNER OF THE 2014 FOLIO PRIZE AND SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2013
George Saunders's most wryly hilarious and disturbing collection yet, Tenth of December illuminates human experience and explores figures lost in a labyrinth of troubling preoccupations.
A family member recollects a backyard pole dressed for…
I want to end with a book that showed me that parenting was perfect material for leaning into the surreal. Around the time I read it, the regular rhythm of my life included morning dropoffs at daycare and evening lice checks while my kids watched Power Rangers.
Opening up this story collection, I immediately found stories that took these experiences to fantastical places—like Spells, where a lice lady does her steady work for ashamed mothers as a strange spell takes over her own sons, or Wild Milk, where a mom’s experience with her son’s daycare provider becomes increasingly bizarre.
The entire collection gave me the confidence to surrender to the strangeness, both in my writing and with my kids.
A genre-expanding collection of stories that Publishers Weekly calls “perplexingly captivating” and “astonishing.”
Wild Milk is like Borscht Belt meets Leonora Carrington; it’s like Donald Barthelme meets Pony Head; it’s like the Brothers Grimm meet Beckett in his swim trunks at the beach. In other words, this remarkable collection of stories is unlike anything else you’ve read.
In a dozen radiant stories, award-winning author Cameron Walker brings readers to the water’s edge, where the known world collides with magic and with the mysterious depths of the human heart. Here, a pandemic turns children into sea creatures, a woman bakes unusual pie crusts after a natural disaster, and a young man sets off to see the world in a flying coat. Lyrical and dreamlike, How to Capture Carbon navigates the seas of a changing climate and the transformative power of loss—and of love.
Growing up in New England, my mother had a set of books that she kept in the living room, more for display than anything else. It was The Works of Edgar Allen Poe. I read them and instantly became hooked on horror. In the seventh grade, I entertained my friends at a sleepover by telling them the mysterious clanking noise (created by the baseboard heater) was the ghost of a woman who had once lived in the farmhouse, forced to cannibalize her ten children during a particularly bad winter. And I’ve been enjoying scaring people ever since.
In 1939, on a remote Pacific island, botanical researcher Irene Greer plunged off a waterfall to her death, leaving behind a legacy shrouded in secrets. Her great-niece Julia, a struggling journalist recovering from a divorce, seeks answers decades later.
Tasked with retrieving Dr. Greer’s discovery–a flower that could have world-changing properties–Julia unearths a story rife with hidden agendas and a missionary community unwilling to share the truth. As she confronts the eerie legends and a fellow traveler with his own motives, Julia finds that the longer she stays, the thinner the line between reality and the fantastical becomes until she…
From the award-winning author of Dead Souls and Poe comes an all-new bone-chilling novel where a mysterious island holds the terrifying answers to a woman's past and future.
In 1939, on a remote Pacific island, botanical researcher Irene Greer plunges off a waterfall to her death, convinced the spirits of her dead husband and daughter had joined the nightmarchers-ghosts of ancient warriors that rise from their burial sites on moonless nights. But was it suicide, or did a strange young missionary girl, Agnes, play a role in Irene's deteriorating state of mind?
