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St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

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ABOUT THE BOOK
A dazzling debut, a blazingly original voice: the ten stories in St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves introduce a radiant new talent.
In the collection’s title story, a pack of girls raised by wolves are painstakingly reeducated by nuns. In “Haunting Olivia,” two young boys make midnight trips to a boat graveyard in search of their dead sister, who set sail in the exoskeleton of a giant crab. In “Z.Z.’s Sleepaway Camp for Disordered Dreamers,” a boy whose dreams foretell implacable tragedies is sent to a summer camp for troubled sleepers (Cabin 1, Narcoleptics; Cabin 2, Sleep Apneics; Cabin 3, Somnambulists . . . ).
And “Ava Wrestles the Alligator” introduces the remarkable Bigtree Wrestling Dynasty—Grandpa Sawtooth, Chief Bigtree, and twelve-year-old Ava—proprietors of Swamplandia!, the island’s #1 Gator Theme Park and Café. Ava is still mourning her mother when her father disappears, his final words to her the swamp maxim “Feed the gators, don’t talk to strangers.” Left to look after seventy incubating alligators and an older sister who may or may not be having sex with a succubus, Ava meets the Bird Man, and learns that when you’re a kid it’s often hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.
Russell’s stories are beautifully written and exuberantly imagined, but it is the emotional precision behind their wondrous surfaces that makes them unforgettable. Magically, from the spiritual wilderness and ghostly swamps of the Florida Everglades, against a backdrop of ancient lizards and disconcertingly lush plant life—in an idiom that is as arrestingly lovely as it is surreal—Karen Russell shows us who we are and how we live.
About the Author
Karen Russell, a native of Miami, has been featured in both The New Yorker’s debut fiction issue and New York magazine’s list of twenty-five people to watch under the age of twenty-six. She is a graduate of the Columbia MFA program and is the 2005 recipient of the Transatlantic Review/Henfield Foundation Award; her fiction has recently appeared in Conjunctions, Granta, Zoetrope, Oxford American, and The New Yorker. Twenty-five years old, she lives in New York City.
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My Blog

Daily Candy article "I Love Lucy's"

http://www.dailycandy.com/article.jsp?ArticleId=27081&ci ty=4
Posted by on Fri, 22 Sep 2006 06:52:00 GMT

Read Powells.com Review of the book

"Karen Russell's debut collection of short stories, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, reads like the old stories of the future might: stylistically contemporary, but eerily timeless; st...
Posted by on Mon, 11 Sep 2006 10:12:00 GMT

Read Entertainment Weekly's Review of the book

Entertainment Weekly's Book Review of ST. LUCY'S HOME FOR GIRLS RAISED BY WOLVES: http://www.ew.com/ew/article/review/book/0,6115,1516040_5_0_ ,00.html
Posted by on Fri, 08 Sep 2006 12:13:00 GMT

NPR Interview on Weekend Edition

Click here for the interview that aired Sunday, September 3rd, 2006.
Posted by on Sun, 03 Sep 2006 09:55:00 GMT

Praise

Praise Endlessly inventive, overthetop, overtheedge stories, all delivered in the most confident, exquisitely rambunctious manner. Fabulous fun.Joy Williams, author of The Quick and the Dead and State...
Posted by on Tue, 22 Aug 2006 12:24:00 GMT

Karen Russell Q&A

A Conversation withKaren Russell author of St. Lucys Home for Girls Raised by WolvesQ: Lets address the elephant in the room: youre twenty-four and Ben Marcus hails you as a literary mystic and calls ...
Posted by on Tue, 22 Aug 2006 12:25:00 GMT

Read an Excerpt

EXCERPT Ava Wrestles the AlligatorMy sister and I are staying in Grandpa Sawtooths old house until our father, Chief Bigtree, gets back from the Mainland. Its our first summer alone in the swamp. You ...
Posted by on Tue, 22 Aug 2006 12:23:00 GMT