Swamplandia!
Luther Daniels Bradley (Jacket image), Michael Lio New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011. First Edition [stated], presumed first printing. Hardcover. [10], 315, [11] pages. Illustrated dust jacket front. Signed by the author on the title page. Karen Russell (born July 10, 1981) is an American novelist and short story writer. Her debut novel, Swamplandia!, was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 2009, the National Book Foundation named Russell a 5 Under 35 honoree. She is also the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant". Russell's stories have been featured in The Best American Short Stories, Granta, The New Yorker, Oxford American, and Zoetrope. St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves won Russell the Bard Fiction Prize in 2011. In 2011, Russell was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction. Russell's second book and first novel, Swamplandia!, about a family of alligator wrestlers and their shabby amusement park in the Everglades, was long-listed for the 2011 Orange Prize. The novel won the New York Public Library's 2012 Young Lions Fiction Award. Swamplandia! was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Russell's second collection of short stories was Vampires in the Lemon Grove. Her third short story collection was Orange World and Other Stories. Her short story "The Hox River Window," won the 2012 National Magazine Award for fiction. She is the recipient of the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Berlin Prize. "Reeling for the Empire" won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novelette of 2012. In March 2025, her second novel The Antidote was released. In 2026, Russell started a job with Stanford University as a creative writing professor. From the celebrated twenty-nine-year-old author of the everywhere-heralded short-story collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves comes a blazingly original debut novel that takes us back to the swamps of the Florida Everglades, and introduces us to Ava Bigtree, an unforgettable young heroine. The Bigtree alligator-wrestling dynasty is in decline, and Swamplandia!, their island home and gator-wrestling theme park, formerly #1 in the region, is swiftly being encroached upon by a fearsome and sophisticated competitor called the World of Darkness. Ava’s mother, the park’s indomitable headliner, has just died; her sister, Ossie, has fallen in love with a spooky character known as the Dredgeman, who may or may not be an actual ghost; and her brilliant big brother, Kiwi, who dreams of becoming a scholar, has just defected to the World of Darkness in a last-ditch effort to keep their family business from going under. Ava’s father, affectionately known as Chief Bigtree, is AWOL; and that leaves Ava, a resourceful but terrified thirteen, to manage ninety-eight gators and the vast, inscrutable landscape of her own grief. Against a backdrop of hauntingly fecund plant life animated by ancient lizards and lawless hungers, Karen Russell has written an utterly singular novel about a family’s struggle to stay afloat in a world that is inexorably sinking. An arrestingly beautiful and inventive work from a vibrant new voice in fiction. Condition: Very good / Very good.
Keywords: Alligator-wrestling, Theme Park, Dredgeman, Chief Bigtree, Everglades
ISBN: 9780307263995
[Book #91876]
Price: $150.00