Karen Russell – författare

In the Florida Everglades, gator-park Swamplandia! is in trouble. Its star performer, the great beauty and champion alligator-wrestler Hilola Bigtree, has succumbed to cancer, and Ava, her resourceful but terrified 13-year-old daughter, is left in charge with her two siblings. But Ava's sister has embarked on a romantic relationship with a ghost, her brother has defected to a rival theme park, and her father is AWOL. And then a mysterious figure called Bird Man guides Ava into a perilous part of the swamp called the Underworld, promising he can save both her sister and the park...Swamplandia! was longlisted for the 2011 Orange Prize and shortlisted for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and 2013 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

An awkward teen with a terrible haircut has a reversal of fortune when he finds artefacts from the future lining a seagulls’ nest. In a godforsaken barn, Presidents Eisenhower, John Adams and Rutherford B. Hayes are bemused to find themselves reincarnated as horses. Clyde and Magreb – he a traditional capes-and-coffins vampire, she the more progressive variety – settle in an Italian lemon grove in the hope that its ripe fruit will keep their thirst for blood at bay.‘Russell can take Antarctic tailgaters, an army of seagulls or simply a window and twist a tale that explodes on the page and lingers in the mind’ The Times

This streamlined, step-by-step guide provides students and newcomers in the field of media with an overview of the complete production process, from conceiving of an idea to marketing the final product.Readers will learn what it takes to create a concept, develop it, and then market and sell it. Chapters discuss pitching, producing, marketing visionary concepts, financing, and distributing content. Focused on traditional and non-traditional platforms including social media, websites, and online advertising, this book explores currently evolving media platforms, ideas, and practices and provides examples of how to navigate these unique creative processes. Interviews with business executives offer insider tips and tricks to creating a marketable project.In this book, you will learn how to: Distinguish between a "great idea" and a "marketable idea." Condense your concept into an effective "elevator pitch." Build a basic business plan. Create a marketing strategy, be it traditional, digital, or both. Establish a personal brand and portfolio that will grab the right attention.This book will be of great help to the student, independent filmmaker, and content creator looking to understand the process of getting their work produced, distributed, and marketed.

This streamlined, step-by-step guide provides students and newcomers in the field of media with an overview of the complete production process, from conceiving of an idea to marketing the final product.Readers will learn what it takes to create a concept, develop it, and then market and sell it. Chapters discuss pitching, producing, marketing visionary concepts, financing, and distributing content. Focused on traditional and non-traditional platforms including social media, websites, and online advertising, this book explores currently evolving media platforms, ideas, and practices and provides examples of how to navigate these unique creative processes. Interviews with business executives offer insider tips and tricks to creating a marketable project.In this book, you will learn how to: Distinguish between a "great idea" and a "marketable idea." Condense your concept into an effective "elevator pitch." Build a basic business plan. Create a marketing strategy, be it traditional, digital, or both. Establish a personal brand and portfolio that will grab the right attention.This book will be of great help to the student, independent filmmaker, and content creator looking to understand the process of getting their work produced, distributed, and marketed.

'I loved Orange World... a collection of short stories in which demons live in drains, bog women come back from the dead and trees can grow inside the human body' Daisy Johnson, New Statesman BOOK OF THE YEAR'A rare combination of literary brilliance and unbridled entertainment' Mark HaddonThese exuberant, unforgettable stories showcase Karen Russell's comedic and imaginative talent for creating outlandish predicaments that uncannily mirror our inner lives. In 'The Bad Graft', a couple on a road trip stop in Joshua Tree National Park, where the spirit of a giant tree accidentally infects the young woman, their fates becoming permanently entangled. In 'The Prospectors' two opportunistic young women fleeing the Depression strike out for new territory, but find themselves fighting for their lives. In the brilliant and hilarious title story a new mother desperate to ensure her baby's safety strikes a deal with the devil to protect her baby. Stories of survival, love and of surreal and magnificent transformation show Russell writing at exhilarating new heights.Praise for Orange World:'The worlds of the stories are entirely convincing, small pockets in which it is possible to become lost' Guardian'One of our most original short story writers... Russell has impeccable command of her form' New York Times Book Review

'Sleep Donation has a dreamlike beauty while remaining ominous and off-kilter. Parts of it gave me nightmares' Stephen KingAn epidemic of insomnia has left America crippled with exhaustion.Thankfully the Slumber Corps agency provides a lifeline, transfusing sleep to sufferers from healthy volunteers. Recruitment manager Trish Edgewater, whose sister Dori was one of the first victims of the disaster, has spent the last seven years enlisting new donors. But when she meets the mysterious Donor Y and Baby A – whose sleep can be universally accepted – her faith in the organisation and in her own motives begins to unravel.Fully illustrated and featuring a brand-new 'Nightmare Appendix', this uncanny and prescient novella from the bestselling author of Swamplandia! will haunt your sleepless nights.Praise for Sleep Donation:‘Russell's ability to balance the quirky and the absurd with psychological acumen…turns this unbelievable world into something more than dreamlike’ NPR‘Russell writes with such assurance and speed that she puts the reader under a spell for the duration of her story’ New York Times‘Russell has a keen sense of dramatic timing and an even sharper ability to turn an internal state into its own weather system’ Boston Globe

An exceptional novel set in the 1930s Dust Bowl about magic, memory and land; above all, a reckoning with America's wilfully forgotten history***Shortlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction******Longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award\"\"\"'Powerful' Financial Times'A pure dust storm of utter genius' DAISY JOHNSON'As profound as it is wonderfully strange' LAUREN GROFFWhat do we choose to remember and what do we allow ourselves to forget?Visit the Antidote of Uz - a prairie witch who can keep your memories safe. Speak into her emerald-green earhorn, and your secrets, your shames, your private joys, will leave your mind and enter hers.Until the Black Sunday storm, which flattens wheatfields, buries houses and vaporizes every memory stored inside the Antidote. She wakes up empty - as bankrupt as America. If her customers ever discover the truth, her life will be in danger.To the Antidote's surprising defence comes Asphodel - young tearaway, girls' basketball captain and aspiring prairie witch - who won't take no for an answer. Along with her Polish wheat-farmer uncle and a New Deal photographer with an enchanted camera, they must confront what has cursed this town- its land on the brink of ruin and its people on the edge of starvation. Apart, they run from the memories that have brought them here. Together, they face down the storm coming their way.The Antidote is above all a reckoning with a nation's forgetting - the wilful omissions passed down from generation to generation. This gripping Dust Bowl epic echoes with urgent warnings for our own time, daring us to imagine what might have been - and what still could be.'Russell has rendered with soul and urgency the vast inexpressible ache at the heart of American gratitude' KAVEH AKBAR'Karen Russell is one in a million' New York Times'This novel swept me up and carried me away' TOMMY ORANGE

VINTAGE CLASSICS' AMERICAN GOTHIC SERIESSpine-tingling, mind-altering and deliciously atmospheric, journey into the dark side of America with nine of its most uncanny classics.'Sleep Donation has a dreamlike beauty while remaining ominous and off-kilter. Parts of it gave me nightmares' Stephen KingAn epidemic of insomnia has left America crippled with exhaustion.Thankfully the Slumber Corps agency provides a lifeline, transfusing sleep to sufferers from healthy volunteers. Recruitment manager Trish Edgewater, whose sister Dori was one of the first victims of the disaster, has spent the last seven years enlisting new donors. But when she meets the mysterious Donor Y and Baby A - whose sleep can be universally accepted - her faith in the organisation and in her own motives begins to unravel.Fully illustrated and featuring a brand-new 'Nightmare Appendix', this uncanny and prescient novella from the bestselling author of Swamplandia! will haunt your sleepless nights.