Karen Russellová

''Powerful'' Financial Times''A pure dust storm of utter genius'' DAISY JOHNSON‘As profound as it is wonderfully strange’ LAUREN GROFFWhat do we choose to remember and what do we allow ourselves to forget?Visit the Antidote of Uz – a prairie witch who can keep your memories safe. Speak into her emerald-green earhorn, and your secrets, your shames, your private joys, will leave your mind and enter hers.Until the Black Sunday storm, which flattens wheatfields, buries houses and vaporizes every memory stored inside the Antidote. She wakes up empty – as bankrupt as America. If her customers ever discover the truth, her life will be in danger.To the Antidote’s surprising defence comes Asphodel – young tearaway, girls’ basketball captain and aspiring prairie witch – who won’t take no for an answer. Along with her Polish wheat-farmer uncle and a New Deal photographer with an enchanted camera, they must confront what has cursed this town: its land on the brink of ruin and its people on the edge of starvation. Apart, they run from the memories that have brought them here. Together, they face down the storm coming their way.The Antidote is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting – the wilful omissions passed down from generation to generation. This gripping Dust Bowl epic echoes with urgent warnings for our own time, daring us to imagine what might have been – and what still could be.‘Russell has rendered with soul and urgency the vast inexpressible ache at the heart of American gratitude’ KAVEH AKBAR‘Karen Russell is one in a million’ New York Times''This novel swept me up and carried me away'' TOMMY ORANGE

VINTAGE CLASSICS' AMERICAN GOTHIC SERIES Spine-tingling, mind-altering and deliciously atmospheric, journey into the dark side of America with nine of its most uncanny classics. An epidemic of insomnia has left America crippled with exhaustion. Thankfully the Slumber Corps agency provides a lifeline, transfusing sleep to sufferers from healthy volunteers. Recruitment manager Trish Edgewater, whose sister Dori was one of the first victims of the disaster, has spent the last seven years enlisting new donors. But when she meets the mysterious Donor Y and Baby A - whose sleep can be universally accepted - her faith in the organisation and in her own motives begins to unravel. Fully illustrated and featuring a brand-new 'Nightmare Appendix', this uncanny and prescient novella from the bestselling author of Swamplandia! will haunt your sleepless nights.

Mimořádně vystavěný a jazykově bohatý románový debut autorky Karen Russellové byl v roce 2012 nominován na Pulitzerovu cenu. Příběh se odehrává v exotickém prostředí bažin na jihozápadě Floridy a vypráví o rodině zápasníků s krokodýly, vyvolávání duchů, Ptačím muži, dvou konkurenčních zábavních parcích, Deseti tisících ostrovech u floridského poloostrova, cestě do podsvětí a mrtvém milenci. Kombinace více než neobvyklá, ale Russellová díky svému výjimečnému citu pro jazyk lehce propojuje skutečné s neskutečným a vytváří z těchto bizarních prvků mnohovrstevnatý příběh, který žánrově osciluje mezi magickým realismem a mysteriózním románem, a přitom zůstává jímavou a zároveň nadmíru zábavnou sondou do života rodiny, která žije v dobrovolném odloučení od společnosti.