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Mythology is a really beautiful vocabulary passed down through centuries that helps us understand the perennial parts of our nature.

Karen Russell

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Karen Russell
Age: 43
Born: 1981
Born: July 10
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Miami
Florida
Parts
Century
Understand
Perennial
Helping
Mythology
Nature
Vocabulary
Beautiful
Centuries
Really
Passed
Helps

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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.
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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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I 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.
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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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I want a real encounter with something true and disconcerting about peoples' natures.
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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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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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Madness, as I understood it from books, meant a person who was open to the high white whine of everything.
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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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