Mythology is a really beautiful vocabulary passed down through centuries that helps us understand the perennial parts of our nature.
Karen RussellI didn’t realize that one tragedy can beget another, and another — bright-eyed disasters flooding out of a death hole like bats out of a cave.
Karen RussellI moved to New York with the derangement of love. I was writing all these terrible stories, but I had never been happier.
Karen RussellMuch of the way books get classified has to do with marketing decisions. I think it's more useful to think of literary books and sci-fi/fantasy books as existing on a continuum. To oppose them, to suggest that one category excludes the other, always feels bogus to me. The great Leonard Michaels line is "I wanted proximity to darkness, strangeness"? That's what I'd say I want from a book, regardless of where it falls on the fantastical spectrum - that suspense connected to a particular human character, rather than just some mechanized plot.
Karen Russell