Vampires in the Lemon Grove

Vampires in the Lemon Grove is Karen Russell's 2013 second story collection, the structural follow-up to Swamplandia! (2011) and St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (2006), and the work that established Russell's broader American literary commercial readership through the New York Times bestseller list. The structural premise is eight fabulist literary fantasy stories that operate across the patient Russell register that distinguishes her project from the broader contemporary American literary fantasy tradition (George Saunders, Kevin Wilson, Aimee Bender, the broader 2000s-and-2010s American literary-fantasy ensemble). The title story ("Vampires in the Lemon Grove") follows two elderly vampires, Clyde and Magreb, who have abandoned the broader vampire tradition of drinking human blood and have replaced it with the lemons of a Sorrento lemon grove that they have been working at across decades. The story collection rotates approximately eight distinct fabulist conceits across the entire volume.

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 that Russell has been refining across the broader catalog. The "Reeling for the Empire" story (about a 1900s Japanese silk-factory whose women workers have been transformed into the silkworms whose silk they reel) is some of the strongest contemporary American literary-fantasy prose about a specific kind of late-Meiji-era industrial-and-gender historical material; the "The Barn at the End of Our Term" story (about the deceased American presidents reborn as horses on a Kentucky farm) is structurally adjacent to the broader American literary-fantasy tradition (Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo can be read as a related project). The collection earned the New York Times Best Book of the Year 2013 designation and the broader Pulitzer-finalist follow-up to Swamplandia! that Russell's broader Pulitzer-finalist track record has continued to support.

Recommended as required contemporary American literary fantasy reading, as the right Russell entry point alongside Swamplandia! and Orange World (2019), and for fans of George Saunders, Kelly Link, and the broader 2010s American literary-fantasy story tradition. The Arthur Morey / Cassandra Campbell audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.