''Orange World and Other Stories'' (2019) is a collection of seven short stories written by the American writer

Karen Russell 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 honore ...

. The collection was published by

Alfred A. Knopf Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. () is an American publishing house that was founded by Alfred A. Knopf Sr. and Blanche Knopf in 1915. Blanche and Alfred traveled abroad regularly and were known for publishing European, Asian, and Latin American writers in ...

in May 2019.

Critical reception

According to the review aggregator,

Book Marks Literary Hub is a daily literary website that launched in 2015 by Grove Atlantic president and publisher Morgan Entrekin, American Society of Magazine Editors Hall of Fame editor Terry McDonell, and Electric Literature founder Andy Hunter. Conten ...

, ''Orange World'' received rave reviews from literary critics.

NPR National Public Radio (NPR, stylized in all lowercase) is an American privately and state funded nonprofit media organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with its NPR West headquarters in Culver City, California. It differs from other ...

wrote "Orange World is a thing of beauty, a stunning collection from one of the most brilliant literary minds of her generation." The ''

Los Angeles Review of Books The ''Los Angeles Review of Books'' (''LARB'' is a literary review magazine covering the national and international book scenes. A preview version launched on Tumblr in April 2011, and the official website followed one year later in April 2012. ...

'' said "Russell’s writing is at times overly lush, like the rich landscapes she describes. But even at its most profligate, her ability to give weird and creepy shape to what might otherwise remain dark corners of the human

psyche Psyche (''Psyché'' in French) is the Greek term for "soul" (ψυχή). Psyche may also refer to: Psychology * Psyche (psychology), the totality of the human mind, conscious and unconscious * ''Psyche'', an 1846 book about the unconscious by Car ...

is refreshing. Orange World and Other Stories is a collection hovering on the threshold between horror and comedy, between the phantasmagoric and the fleshly."''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' wrote "For all their wildness, the stories in “Orange World” are fundamentally tame. Little happens in them that wouldn’t ultimately be palatable, after a glass of

pinot gris Pinot Gris, Pinot Grigio (, ) or Grauburgunder is a white wine grape variety of the species ''Vitis vinifera''. Thought to be a mutant clone of the Pinot Noir variety, it normally has a grayish-blue fruit, accounting for its name, but the gra ...

, in the snuggest of book groups. Not all her endings are happy ones, but love can often save the day.Writing for ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

,'' Daisy Johnson praises how "always Russell's writing reaches past beauty to find the oddity, the heat beneath" and that Russell's ''Orange World'' "inhabits landscape entirely, bringing the Floridian humidity to every sentence". Johnson concludes that "though ussell'scharacters are living their own magic-realist, fabulist lives, it is possible to see ourselves within them, peering out."

References

External links

Penguin Random House
2019 short story collections American short story collections English-language books Alfred A. Knopf books {{2010s-story-collection-stub