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Also by Karen Russell:

The Antidote, March 2025
Hardcover / e-Book
Sleep Donation, April 2014
e-Book
Vampires In The Lemon Grove, February 2013
Hardcover / e-Book
Swamplandia!, August 2011
Hardcover
Swamplandia!, February 2011
Hardcover
St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, September 2006
Hardcover

ST. LUCY'S HOME FOR GIRLS RAISED BY WOLVES
By: Karen Russell

A dazzling debut, a blazingly original voice: the ten stories in St. Lucy?s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves introduce a radiant new talent.

Knopf
September 2006
On Sale: September 5, 2006
256 pages
ISBN: 0307263983
EAN: 9780307263988
Hardcover
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Young Adult | Fiction

In the collection’s title story, a pack of girls raised by wolves are painstakingly reeducated by nuns. In “Haunting Olivia,” two young boys make midnight trips to a boat graveyard in search of their dead sister, who set sail in the exoskeleton of a giant crab. In “Z.Z.’s Sleepaway Camp for Disordered Dreamers,” a boy whose dreams foretell implacable tragedies is sent to a summer camp for troubled sleepers (Cabin 1, Narcoleptics; Cabin 2, Sleep Apneics; Cabin 3, Somnambulists . . . ). And “Ava Wrestles the Alligator” introduces the remarkable Bigtree Wrestling Dynasty—Grandpa Sawtooth, Chief Bigtree, and twelve-year-old Ava—proprietors of Swamplandia!, the island’s #1 Gator Theme Park and Café. Ava is still mourning her mother when her father disappears, his final words to her the swamp maxim “Feed the gators, don’t talk to strangers.” Left to look after seventy incubating alligators and an older sister who may or may not be having sex with a succubus, Ava meets the Bird Man, and learns that when you’re a kid it’s often hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.

Russell’s stories are beautifully written and exuberantly imagined, but it is the emotional precision behind their wondrous surfaces that makes them unforgettable. Magically, from the spiritual wilderness and ghostly swamps of the Florida Everglades, against a backdrop of ancient lizards and disconcertingly lush plant life—in an idiom that is as arrestingly lovely as it is surreal—Karen Russell shows us who we are and how we live.

Media Buzz

Weekend Edition Sunday - September 3, 2006