Litquake talks with Swamplandia author Karen Russell in a final interview before the festival’s kick-off tomorrow! The conversation reveals abhorred writing styles; overused phrases; favorite writers, words and fiction heroes; and more.
“I like assigning The Waves and Geek Love to students, or a book like Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, because you can practically watch their pupils dilate as they read them—I think there are certain books that are so stylistically innovative or so wholly “other” that they detonate inside readers. It’s a grenade-lob, and when the smoke clears these books have transformed the landscape of what fiction can be and do.”
