Karen Russell
photo credit: Michael Lionstar |
Karen Russell graduated from Columbia University's MFA program in 2006. Her stories have been featured in The Best American Short Stories, Conjunctions, Granta, the New Yorker, Oxford American, and Zoetrope. Her first book of short stories, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, was published in 2006. In 2009, she was named a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" honoree. In 2010, she was named a New Yorker "20 Under 40" honoree. Her first novel, Swamplandia!, was published in 2011, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Russell's first novella, Sleep Donation, is just out. You'll find her on Facebook. |
Excerpted from an Interview with Karen Russell, by David Naimon |
 |
| We've been inundated with doom-mongering of late. And there is also this concern about hyperconnectivity and hyperarousal. The world is changing at such a velocity, it's really true that it's a strange thing to be awake and watch it happen. I wrote this goofy piece for Harper's about beepers. When we were teenagers, beepers were like the proto-Internet, our adolescent technology. Drug dealers, doctors and Miami teenagers all carried around these beepers. It felt revolutionary. We were wireless. Someone could think about you, punch in your code and then that thought would detonate. And you knew then someone was thinking about you. It externalized and formalized teenage telepathy. Now to see babies walking around with moon rocks in their hands linking them to the Internet, that change has happened at an insane velocity and a lot of people probably feel disoriented. I certainly did. I'm sure that was percolating when I was thinking about millions of Americans who have lost the ability to sleep. What would that really look like if suddenly vast portions of the population were just awake all the time? | |