Publisher Description
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. List of Readers Ava Wrestles the Alligator--Arielle Sitrick Haunting Olivia--Zach McLarty Z.Z.’s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers--Patrick Mackie The Star-Gazer’s Log of Summer-Time Crime--Nick Chamian from Children’s Reminiscences of the Westward Migration--Jesse Bernstein Lady Yeti and the Palace of Artificial Snows--J.B. Adkins The City of Shells--Kathe Mazur Out To Sea--Arthur Morey Accident Brief, Occurrence # 00/422--Kirby Heyborne St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves--Deirdre Lovejoy
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“Russell writes even the smallest details with audacious, witty precision…and her scenes deftly balance mythology and the gleeful absurdity of Monty Python with a darker urgency to acknowledge the ancient, the infinite, and the inadequacies of being human.”
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Booklist (starred review)
About Karen Russell
Karen Russell, a
native of Miami, won the 2012 National Magazine Award for fiction, and her
first novel Swamplandia! was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is
a graduate of the Columbia MFA program, a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2012
Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. She lives in Philadelphia.
About the Narrators
Fred Sanders, an actor and Earphones Award–winning narrator, has received critics’ praise for his audio narrations that range from nonfiction, memoir, and fiction to mystery and suspense. He been seen on Broadway in The Buddy Holly Story, in national tours for Driving Miss Daisy and Big River, and on such television shows as Seinfeld, The West Wing, Will and Grace, Numb3rs,Titus, and Malcolm in the Middle. His films include Sea of Love, The Shadow, and the Oscar-nominated short Culture. He is a native New Yorker and Yale graduate.
Neil Hellegers grew up in New Jersey and attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a BA in theater arts and a minor in psychology before getting an MFA in acting from the Trinity Rep Conservatory in Providence, Rhode Island. He moved to New York City in 2003 and, since then, has made a career of theatrical performance, percussion, theater education, and audiobook narration. He currently lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.