Karen russell

I love weird or funny or beautiful sentences; Joy Williams could write a microwave-oven manual and I'm sure I'd love it, because the sentences would be tuned up like music.

Now I'll read anytime, anywhere. I love reading in front of the space heater. Isn't that a sad confession? But it's like my substitute for the roaring fireplace of yore.

In short stories there's more permission to be elliptical. You can have image-logic, or it's almost like a poem in that you can come to a lot of meanings within a short space.

I took a fiction-writing workshop my sophomore year at Northwestern, and I hadn't yet read Junot Diaz or George Saunders, Flannery O'Connor. There was something so attractive about those voices.

I also love animals, and I worked at a veterinary clinic for a while, but it turns out that loving animals and removing deflated basketballs from the intestinal tracts of animals are two very...

I'm living two blocks away from this library - and I don't know why I was so elated about this - but I'm in my mesh jogging shorts in the elevator and I saw that my book 'Swamplandia!' was their book...

The very best moment of writing 'Swamplandia!' was when I figured out what the ending should be. And even though I changed the prose of it, that realization was an ice cube melting in my chest.

I wrote 'Ava Wrestles the Alligator' when I was 22 or 23. These people and that world have been evolving in me for a while. It's such a shift not to be in that world.

At the end of the block where I used to live in Coconut Grove in Miami, there's a swampy area, a no-name alcove with a little mangrove estuary. It's beautiful.

I tended to be drawn to the weirder, darker stuff. Horror and sci-fi anthologies.