Name: Jeff James's review of Orange World and Other Stories by Karen Russell
Item: Orange World and Other Stories
Rating: 5
Author: Jeff James

Karen Russell

From the Pulitzer Finalist and universally beloved author of the New York Times best sellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove, 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.

Orange World and Other Stories

Kat Albanese

"I love you," they tell each other frequently on these calls. More truth won't fit through the tiny colander of the telephone receiver.

I was nothing, or I was breath absorbed into the spinning wind. I would follow my cloud into the storm's vacant core. I would want for nothing, feel nothing. I would be spun apart.

I didn’t spook. I didn’t complain about wading shin-deep through trash bags in Times Square or the festival of elbows.

A loose wisp swallowed back into the parent storm. Black heaven spiraling like a celestial drill bit.

Springtime meant air filled to brimming with secret moisture, begging to be captured and spun into the dark wombs of my twisters.

They were born at the same moment, twins: our baby daughter and the danger.

The pale funnel pulsed out and contracted, like a star exploring its cosmos. In the sunlight, against the dark walls of the chute, it became a ghostly gramophone needle, leaping and falling, lightly and blindly, searching for the groove.

Prices for violent storms have bottomed out, and farmers are downsizing, doing dust devils, doing siroccos. Walls of dust raise themselves, some reaching eight thousand feet under the blazing sun, swallowing the gas flares over the oil wells. The jet stream is not cooperating.

Neither, for that matter, is the economy.

There was a time when a family could support itself with the sale of one or two tornadoes a year, but those days are long gone. To survive you have to sell out to the rodeos, the monster-truck rallies. We don't suffer alone. Offshore rigs report that waterspouts have all but dried up.

Here on the plains, an early frost snuffed every budding funnel cloud.

These days anybody with sense farms winds. Winds are the growth industry.

Clean energy. You want to get out ahead of the apocalypse, get into winds.

Supercells, those alpha storms that bulge with precipitation like muscle, cost too much in upkeep and insurance for all but the corporate outfits. Culls deemed unfit for sale are left to spin out in the green canyons, thousands of acres of privately held weather graveyards.

Moisture began to clot on my glasses, so I removed them. Some things, I swear, I see better without correction. Tornadoes, for one.

My eyes often snag on irrelevancies when I'm wearing my glasses; without them, I can take in more. The panorama, you know, the whole sublime blur.

She trotted into the blackness like a small key entering a tall lock.

Moths blinked wings at them, crescents of blue and red and tiger-yellow, like eyes caught in a net.

You had to really cultivate an ending. To get it to last, you had to kneel and tend to the burial ground, continuously firming your resolution.

Usually, you can only catch the Sasquatch blur of your own legendary moments in the side mirrors.

His wild eyes were like bees trapped on the wrong side of a window, bouncing along the glass.

Jeff James

From the Pulitzer Finalist and universally beloved author of the New York Times best sellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove, 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.

Some hits and some misses, but some beautiful language imagery throughout. 

Josefine

Eva Ströberg

This book is recommended to me, since I like odd/horror short stories and it does not disappoint. The eight stories in this book are downright bizzare and entertaining. Take the first one with two girls taking a mountain lift hoping to crash into a fancy party but ending up partying with ghosts instead, or the last story that lends the title to the book - Orange World, about a new mom who has struck a deal with the devil thinking that the deal will keep the baby alive

I’ve never heard of Karen Russell before but I’ll now try to find her other books!

cleverly, imaginatively, skillfully, playfully, mystically inventive.

enchanting worlds that stem from reality but end up tilting, hazing, subtly evolving into the surreal.

i feel like a good handful of these stories will stick with me. they were memorable. special. or caught me by surprise.

impressive and not too bizarre just for the sake of being bizarre. 🧡 i loved it.

cleverly, imaginatively, skillfully, playfully, mystically inventive.

enchanting worlds that stem from reality but end up tilting, hazing, subtly evolving into the surreal.

completely accessible. 

i feel like a good handful of these stories will stick with me. they were memorable. special. or caught me by surprise.

tastefully done.

light comedy. 

a rich sensory experience.

impressive and not too bizarre just for the sake of being bizarre. 🧡 i loved it.

This is a pretty good collection of short stories. Some of the speculative ones are quite creative. 

Ashlyn

Although I didn’t love every single story in this collection, enough of them knocked it out of the park that I loved it as a whole. I’d already read the title story when it was published in the New Yorker, but it was fantastic the first time around, so I didn’t mind listening again. It’s probably my favorite story of the bunch, but most of the stories in this collection are equally fantastic, so it’s hard to rate one over the others.

One interesting thing to note about this collection is that I could really tell how Russell’s writing style has changed since St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. The stories in her first collection were oftentimes elliptical and unresolved, whereas these newer stories generally have complete arcs. I like both types of her stories, although I do tend to prefer stories that resolve. It’s rare that I enjoy elliptical storytelling in any medium.

Krista M.

Whimsical-Nostalgic-Yearning
Harder to get through than St.Lucys (same author). Interesting stories but not as gripping, these had a similar nostalgic tinge to them but I never felt like I needed more of the story than we were given. 

Erin 

The Prospectors: 4.5 stars
The Bad Graft: 2 stars - I really disliked the narrator for this story. I'm glad each story had a different one, because if I was stuck with this guy for the whole thing, I'd definitely have given up.
Madam Bovary's Greyhound: 4 stars - I have a note that says I really liked this one, but for the life of me can't remember what it's about.
Bog Girl: 4 stars - This one I also really liked, and I do remember it!
The Tornado Auction: 2 stars
Black Corfu: 2 stars - The beginning was good, and the end was good, but it ain't short if it's 88 minutes long.
The Gondoliers: 3 stars - Also very long. Also maybe not worth it (I can't remember).
Orange World: 5 stars, I think (I forgot to update). This one was also long, but I think it was worth it.

A bit hit or miss. I definitely think listening to the audiobook for this one in particular changed the experience for me, although good or bad I do not know. Either way, I feel about the same with the one as I did Vampires in the Lemon Grove, which means I will definitely be picking up more of Karen Russell's work. This may be the fasted I've ever gone through a single author's bibliography. Orange World and Bog Girl were definitely my favourites. The above stories averages to about 3, but I'd up it to 3.5, I think.

Sara Sunshine

Adrian Ray Amboy

savannah eden

vive

Kyle Curry

Nora 

"From the Pulitzer finalist and universally beloved author of the New York Times best sellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove, a stunning new collection of short fiction that showcases her extraordinary gifts of language and imagination"--

Jeff James &
Orange World and Other Stories by Karen Russell

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Jeff James &Orange World and Other Stories by Karen Russell

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Jeff James &
Orange World and Other Stories by Karen Russell