A prairie witch and company confront a calamity in Karen Russell’s awesome new novel.

On this episode of Fully Booked, Karen Russell joins us to discuss her long-anticipated sophomore novel, The Antidote (Knopf, March 11). “In the wake of the destructive Black Sunday dust storm in 1935, four outcasts dare to offer their dying town a radical vision of the future,” Kirkus writes in a starred review, calling The Antidote “a storytelling tour de force that lives up to the promise of its name.”

Russell is the New York Times–bestselling author of six books of fiction, including the novel Swamplandia!, a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and the critically acclaimed story collections Vampires in the Lemon Grove and Orange World and Other Stories. Born and raised in Miami, Florida, she is a MacArthur Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband, son, and daughter, and serves on the board of Street Books, a mobile library for people living outdoors.

Here’s a bit more from our starred review of The Antidote: “Antonina Rossi, an Italian immigrant and survivor of the Milford Home for Unwed Mothers, is the prairie witch of Uz, Nebraska. By falling into a trance, she relieves customers of memories they no longer want and deposits them in the vault of her subconscious. When the dust storm sweeps those memories clean away, Rossi recognizes her ‘bankruptcy’ for what it really is: a mortal danger. Like most witches, Rossi is an outsider, and she throws her lot in with a band of fellow misfits. There’s Asphodel Oletsky, a teen basketball star and born hustler in love with her best friend; Harp Oletsky, Dell’s shy bachelor uncle, whose farm miraculously survives the roiling clouds of dust; and Cleo Allfrey, a Black government photographer sent to document the crisis with a camera that somehow captures the past—and the possibilities of the future.…[W]hat’s really on display here is Russell’s reckoning with America’s past and her hopeful appeals for its future. She juxtaposes the immigration story of the Oletskys against the forced removal of Native Americans from the West and lets the catastrophe of the Dust Bowl resonate with the contemporary horrors of climate change.…While the full picture of the novel takes time to develop, the final portrait is as unforgettable as the images Cleo Allfrey hangs on her darkroom line: A singular, haunting vision that fearlessly excavates the past and challenges the reader to face the future head-on.”

Russell and I begin by acknowledging a shared enthusiasm for roller-skating. She expresses excitement that someone—anyone—will read the book after its “long gestational process”; I assure her it was worth the wait. She describes The Antidote as a polyphonic novel with four POV characters, plus a scarecrow and a cat, set in western Nebraska during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl drought. We contemplate building a custom Monopoly game around The Antidote, and what the tokens representing each character would be (an ear trumpet, a basketball, a camera, etc.). Russell explains how she thought of the prairie witch and the photographer as countervailing forces in the book. We get into her research, which was extensive—with special thanks to Pawnee historian James Riding In and agroecologist Mimi Casteel. We talk about photographs, systems of oppression, Louise Erdrich, a chapter that wound up on the cutting room floor (from the POV of flying soil), an E.L. Doctorow quotation, resolving the threads of a plot versus resolving the emotional arc of a character, what mothers of all species want for their children, when Russell identifies as a logophile, and much more. 

Then editors Laura Simeon, John McMurtrie, Mahnaz Dar, and Laurie Muchnick share their top picks in books for the week.

EDITORS’ PICKS:

Design Thinking: A Guide to Innovation by Fred Estes (Twenty-First Century/Lerner)

Okchundang Candy by Jung-soon Go, trans. by Aerin Park (Levine Querido)

Close to Home: The Wonders of Nature Just Outside Your Door by Thor Hanson (Basic Books)

Three Days in June by Anne Tyler (Knopf)

THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS:

Brandy, Dame of the Caribbean by Dan E. Hendrickson

The Hartford Atonement by Philip Barbara

The Adventures of Israel St. James by Nathaniel Hicklin, illus. by Jason Belden

Fully Booked is produced by Cabel Adkins Audio and Megan Labrise.