Orange World

Orange World is Karen Russell's 2019 third story collection, the structural follow-up to Vampires in the Lemon Grove (2013) and St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (2006) and the work that continued Russell's broader American literary fantasy project. The structural premise is eight more fabulist literary fantasy stories that operate across the patient Russell register that distinguishes her project from the broader contemporary American literary fantasy tradition. The title story ("Orange World") follows Rae, a new mother in Portland, Oregon, who has made a milk-pact with a small devil who appears in the storm-drain outside her house and who has been nursing the devil across the entire fifteen-month period since her baby was born. The collection rotates eight distinct fabulist conceits across the volume — including a Florida-set fishing story about a captain whose hooks bring in only ghost-fish, a tornado-romance story, and a New Mexico ranch story about a girl whose siblings have been turned into scarecrows.

Russell's structural method is the patient short-story construction across the eight stories, with the broader fabulist literary fantasy register operating in the patient close-third-person omniscient mode Russell has been refining across the broader catalog. The collection is slightly less consistent than Vampires in the Lemon Grove — the Bog Girl story and the title story are the structural peaks; the Madame Bovary's Greyhound story is the structural weak point — but the overall craft remains at the contemporary American literary-fantasy peak that Russell has established as her structural standard. The collection earned the New York Times Best Book of the Year 2019 designation and continued the Russell career trajectory that the Pulitzer-finalist Swamplandia! had established.

Recommended for committed Russell readers, as the right Russell follow-up to Vampires in the Lemon Grove, and for fans of contemporary American literary fantasy. Compare to George Saunders's Tenth of December, Kelly Link's Get In Trouble, and the broader 2010s American literary-fantasy short-story tradition. The Cassandra Campbell audiobook is the definitive audio production. Four solid stars.