by Karen Russell
2014’s featured book is full of alligators and amusement parks and ghosts and lots and lots of mosquitoes.
One of the characters dives into a pool filled with alligators and we think you should dive into Swamplandia’s weird world of Southern Florida where, amongst those mosquitoes, there is a strange mingling of ghosts, gators and three siblings whose lives are a bit adrift.
Swamplandia doesn’t just have alligators. It also has stacked up many an accolade including being one of three books that were short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize in 2012 (a year when, oddly, no winner was chosen). It made the longlist for the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction and was one of three nominees for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction (2012). Most notably, Karen Russell was recently awarded the prestigious MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” in 2013 for her writing. Add alligators on top of all those honors and you’ve got a novel that Stephen King calls, “Brilliant, funny, original . . . this book will not leave my mind.”
Find Swamplandia! at your local library:
