Vampires in the Lemon Grove: Stories Audiobook

Quotes

• “Hilarious, exquisite, first-rate…A grim, stupendous, unfavorable magic is at work in these stories.”

  — New York Times Book Review

• “Each story is more inventive than the last, juxtaposing mundane human experiences and profound questions about consciousness, love, and mortality, with a hint of the supernatural…As Russell’s imagination soars, so does our joy in reading this collection.”

  — O, The Oprah Magazine

• “Delightfully bizarre…bone-chilling…fantasy and horror underlined with social commentary.”

  — People

• “In these tales [Russell] combines careful research with minutely imagined details and a wonderfully vital sleight of hand to create narratives that possess both the resonance of myth and the immediacy of something new.”

  — New York Times

• “Exquisitely peculiar…[Vampires in the Lemon Grove] trades in the mythological waters of the Florida Everglades for eight new, but still darkly fantastical and dangerous worlds that constantly remind the reader that monsters and violence are always around the corner, and in ourselves.”

  — Wall Street Journal

• “Beautiful tales…Vampires in the Lemon Grove should cement Russell’s reputation as one of the most remarkable fantasists writing today.”

  — Washington Post

• “A force to behold…Russell establishes herself as a writer to track and to treasure.”

  — Chicago Tribune

• “Astonishing…Vampires in the Lemon Grove stands out as Russell’s best book…with prose so alive it practically back-flips off the page.”

  — San Francisco Chronicle

• “A master of magical realism…There is an exuberance to [Russell’s] descriptive abilities, a kind of ludic writerly joy in the process that translates to a readerly thrill in the results.”

  — New York Observer

• “A darkly surreal treat.”

  — Wired

• “Wildly inventive…wondrously strange and moving.”

  — Reader’s Digest

• “Delightfully weird…moving.”

  — Esquire

• “Powerful…Russell pulls the rug out on our imagination, creating perplexing, surreal scenarios that bump into the common reality that most of us take for granted.”

  — Minneapolis Star Tribune

• “One of the most innovative, inspired short-story collections in the past decade…Vampires in the Lemon Grove is flawless and magnificent, and there’s absolutely no living author quite like Karen Russell.”

  — NPR

• “If Vampires in the Lemon Grove is an indicator of the future, Russell’s stories will be seizing our imaginations—and nibbling at the edges of our nightmares—for years to come.”

  — Miami Herald

• “Witty, and wise, and brimming with vitality…In Russell’s stories, malice strolls with morality, horror tangos with humor, and the spirits of Franz Kafka and Flannery O’Connor meet with unexpected comity.”

  — Richmond Times-Dispatch

• “Wildly imaginative…gorgeous…Russell has once again mapped the dark country between our everyday and more primal selves.”

  — Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

• “The stories in Karen Russell’s wonderful collection embrace the monstrous, the mutant, the mysterious…the stories—even the frothiest—are sea deep, scary smart, richly inventive, highly illuminating, and gorgeously written.”

  — More

• “Karen Russell’s stories defy definition. They are at once warm and sinister, a bubble bath with a shark fin lurking underneath the suds.”  

  — Millions

• “Wildly inventive.”

  — National

• “It’s difficult to think of another writer working today who has Russell’s talent for gorgeous, risky prose and a seemingly endless arsenal of odd, inventive narratives. Give her a setting and she’ll grow beautiful monsters in [a] brilliantly described ecosystem.”

  — Interview

• “Russell’s great gift…is her ability to create whole landscapes and lifetimes of strangeness within the confines of a short story.”

  — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

• “Reading Vampires in the Lemon Grove is like taking off on a round-the-universe trip, each story a new adventure where the usual rules don’t apply…What Russell is doing doesn’t yet have a name. And that is why her work is so wonderful.”

  — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

• “The offbeat lusciousness of [Swamplandia] seems to be repeated in Russell’s new story collection…Don’t miss [it].” 

  — Library Journal

• “Excellent…It’s a strange compliment, but a genuine one, to say that Russell’s imagination really is capable of inducing nausea and terror.”

  — Barnes & Noble, editorial review