Literary Birthday – 10 July – Karen Russell

Happy Birthday, Karen Russell, born 10 July 1981.

Six Quotes

1. People really get myopic as they get older. We’re not a culture that encourages dreaming or distraction. We’re not ever good at just being.
2. When I was younger I used to lock myself in the bathroom and read in the dry tub.
3. Fiction helps me to reconnect with the true, deep weirdness inherent in everyday reality, in our dealings with one another, in just being alive.
4. For me, writing is a parenthesis where I can make sense of life.
5. I think that different pleasures work for different readers – a friend of mine won’t read anything that’s not a cardiovascular sort of page-turner. I tend to care less about plot, but I’m a sucker for humour and strangeness.
6. Sometimes it can feel like the whole globe is spinning with irredeemable losses, capricious natural disasters and crimes so outrageously evil they dismantle any attempt to solve or explain them.

Karen Russell is an American novelist and short story writer. Her debut novel, Swamplandia!, was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

by Amanda Patterson

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