Stag

Karen Russell writes the kind of fiction that is hard to file in any one drawer. Her debut story collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves arrived in 2006 and immediately established the territory she would go on to mine in Swamplandia, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, and Orange World. American settings stretched into something just slightly off, characters dealing with grief and family and the deep weirdness of being alive, and a willingness to let the surreal sit right next to the everyday without explaining itself away.

Stag fits into that general project. Russell’s shorter pieces tend to hover around twenty to forty pages, which gives her room to fully build a strange situation without overstaying the welcome. Her sentences carry a lot of music in them. She trained as a poet before turning to fiction and you can hear it in the rhythms. Her humor is dry, often dark, and rarely the point. Underneath the surrealism, her stories are almost always about ordinary human things. Loneliness, loss, the way memory bends around an event you cannot quite forgive yourself for.

Readers who like George Saunders, Kelly Link, Aimee Bender, or Carmen Maria Machado will find a writer in conversation with all of them. Russell is generous with her reader and she does not write the kind of difficult literary fiction that wants to keep people out. The strangeness in her work is an invitation, not a barrier. For new readers, start with St. Lucy’s Home for Girls and work outward. Stag is a good sample of the voice that has made her one of the most distinctive American story writers of her generation.