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So much 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.

Karen Russell

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Karen Russell
Age: 43
Born: 1981
Born: July 10
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Miami
Florida
Fantasy
Decision
Classified
Books
Continuum
Book
Existing
Much
Literary
Way
Marketing
Think
Useful
Thinking
Decisions

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A food truce, the picnic suspension of oedipal feeling that permits the generations to love each other at family reunions.
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No, I don’t have to tell a soul about this, I promised myself. When you are a kid, you don’t know yet that a secret, like an animal, can evolve. Like an animal, a secret can develop a self-preserving intelligence. Shaglike, mute and thick, a knowledge with a fur: your secret.
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Myth continues to be a valuable way to understand parts of our nature that we can't quantify.
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I moved to New York with the derangement of love. I was writing all these terrible stories, but I had never been happier.
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Self-disciplin e is necessary, but so is playfulness, flexibility, joy. When you stop demanding perfection of yourself, your writing desk will become a spacious place.
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Mythology is a really beautiful vocabulary passed down through centuries that helps us understand the perennial parts of our nature.
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I do think there's something when you have an unbroken day, and it feels like you and your attention can just be together like birds again and you can actually think and dream a little.
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When I was younger I used to lock myself in the bathroom and read in the dry tub. I was also a fan of the 'shoe closet.' Reading felt thrilling and illicit and deeply private to me, and I felt vulnerable doing it in public.
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My backyard was replete with madness, it just grew indigenously in South Florida.
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Pain collected into deep pockets and I was aware of this painbut somehow I could not seem to feel it. It was like a body-deafness.
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Madness, as I understood it from books, meant a person who was open to the high white whine of everything.
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Growing up, Catholic church really was such an incubator for my imagination, because all of those mysteries felt embedded in this insanely green, tropical landscape: the ocean nearby, the giant banyan trees. It all felt part of one seamless mystery to me.
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America's great talent, I think, is to generate desires that would never have occurred, natively,... and to make those desires so painfully real that money becomes a fiction, an imaginary means to some concrete end.
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For me, the term literary fiction means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication.
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When you're a kid, it's hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.
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It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams.
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It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity.
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My favorite classes were always dumb nerdy vocabulary.
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And I do think that great fiction, even when it's comedic, has an urgency or an inevitability to it, a sense that the writer absolutely had to write this particular story in this way.
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I have a B.A. in Spanish, so briefly I thought that somebody might pay me to speak Spanish badly in another country, like Norway.
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