Latest news with #TheAntidote
Winnipeg Free Press
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
On the night table
Guy Gavriel Kay Author, Written on the Dark I often give shout outs to authors I've loved, not so much authors I've just read — but I've just read Karen Russell's new novel The Antidote, which is being talked up as a potential Pulitzer Prize winner. And I enjoyed that. Ted Davis photo Guy Gavriel Kay Buy on Weekly A weekly look at what's happening in Winnipeg's arts and entertainment scene. I love Patrick Modiano, the French Nobel Prize Laureate; I think he's a sorcerer as a writer. I love Penelope Fitzgerald, the English writer — A.S. Byatt said she's the greatest English writer since the Second World War, which is pretty hyperbolic, but anybody who gets that said about them has something going for them. I read primarily contemporary fiction, and re-read a lot. As I get older, every fourth or fifth book I read is going back to something I loved. It's nervous making, because you might go back to a book you loved when you were an undergrad or 30 years old, or 15 years old, and find that it's not so great. It's a relief, almost, to re-read something 30 or 40 years later and say, 'wow, this really is good' — you feel good about yourself. The Antidote
Time Magazine
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
The 14 Best Books of 2025 So Far
There's no better time than the start of summer to take a pause and reset your priorities. And, if we may be so bold, one of those priorities really should be to dig into one of the many great new books that have been published this year. It's only June, and yet we've already been blessed with a wealth of heart-rending memoirs, absorbing novels, and mind-expanding nonfiction. Meander through the beguiling mind of a theater actress, take a siblings road trip that challenges the very notion of family, or delve into a deep, personal secret. Here, the 14 best books of the year so far. The Antidote, Karen Russell It feels like the U.S. has lived 100 lifetimes since Karen Russell's much-lauded 2011 debut Swamplandia!, but it's safe to say that her highly anticipated follow-up The Antidote was worth the wait. An American epic that takes place in the 1930s in the fictional town of Uz, Neb., the story centers on a prairie witch who calls herself 'the Antidote.' A healer of sorts, the Antidote, like other prairie witches, is a keeper of others' thoughts—a memory vault who absorbs the heaviness of people's grief so they may have a chance at feeling lightness again. But when a dust bowl devastates the town, it takes the witch's memory deposits with it and leaves her fearful for her safety. What will happen to her when people can no longer unload their worst—and have to actually live with themselves? Told from the vantage point of multiple inhabitants of Uz, The Antidote is a sprawling yet meticulous story that implores us to see American history in its fullness, scars and all.— Rachel Sonis Audition, Katie Kitamura's taut and incisive follow-up to Intimacies, begins on a rich premise. The narrator, a successful actress navigating a difficult new role, goes to a Manhattan restaurant to meet a younger man, Xavier, who claims he's her son. It's impossible. The actress, who goes unnamed, has never given birth or been a parent. But the strange encounter isn't their last; Xavier begins working on the same play, and his bold assertion prompts her to unravel the many choices and performances that have brought her to this particular moment, on stage and in life. Halfway through, Audition changes realities, completely redefining the relationship between the two. Kitamura's tantalizing novel asks a lot of the reader, offering multiple versions of the same life that circle around an idea raised by the protagonist herself:'As you get older things become less clear.' —Mahita Gajanan In his second novel, Ocean Vuong sheds the epistolary conceit of his acclaimed debut, 2019's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. The result is a more sprawling yet direct coming-of-age tale animated by the specificity of its characters. When we meet 19-year-old Hai, he's standing ominously on a bridge in his depressed hometown of East Gladness, Conn. His first love is dead of a fentanyl overdose and his mom believes the flimsy lie that he's at medical school, leaving Hai with a craving for opioids and nowhere to go. Before he can do anything drastic, he's spotted by a dementia-stricken elderly woman, Grazina, who must sense his fundamental gentleness, because she says he can move into her place if he'll care for her. Along with his misfit coworkers at a fast-food joint, Grazina anchors the lost boy, even as her own mind drifts from its moorings. A premise that a lesser writer might churn into inspiration porn becomes, in Vuong's hands, a vivid, funny, emotionally realistic case study in the life-altering potential of community.— Judy Berman There are many debut novels about young people finding love and seeking purpose, but few are as perceptive about the connection between those pursuits as Naomi Xu Elegant's ruminative Gingko Season. Stubbornly fixated on a college boyfriend who broke her heart, 20-something narrator Penelope Lin works at a Philadelphia museum, pores over the city's history, and maintains a modest social life, largely disconnected from her family. When she meets a guy, Hoang, who has just confessed to freeing mice marked for death at the lab where he works, their excruciatingly slow-moving courtship pushes Penelope to think harder about her own principles and priorities. Elegant's writing is as unassuming as her heroine, yet the questions she raises about how to live with integrity in a compromised world can be startlingly profound.— Judy Berman The argument that flows from this book is simple: rivers, for all of the essential nutrients, biodiversity, and transportation possibilities they provide, deserve to be treated with the same respect as other living organisms. Robert Macfarlane visited three rivers, starting with the River of the Cedars in an Ecuadorian cloud forest, recently threatened by mining companies. He surveyed waterways in Chennai, India, which flood streets with crocodiles and catfish after cyclones. And he visited Mutehekau Shipu in Quebec, the first Canadian river to be given rights, including the right to be pollution-free. The author of Underland lends his expertise to raise awareness about a part of nature that is often taken for granted. Readers see that while rivers can be easily wounded, they can also quickly heal—if given the right care.— Olivia B. Waxman Ron Chernow, the author of the best-selling tomes Alexander Hamilton and Grant, offers a frank assessment of Mark Twain, the first major literary celebrity in the U.S. and a leading pundit of the Civil War era whose writings helped Americans make sense of life after slavery. While his novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn became classics, Twain made poor financial decisions that bankrupted him and forced him to flee the country and spend nearly a decade in exile. Chernow's biography gives the encyclopedic treatment to the writer, boasting about 1,200 pages based on his books, letters, and unpublished manuscripts. —Olivia B. Waxman In this dystopian speculative fiction novel, Vietnamese Americans are shipped to internment camps following a terrorist attack, with their civil rights and dignity stripped in the name of national security. While the premise could result in an overly dour or preachy book, Nguyen's novel zips forward with page-turning suspense, humor, and nuance. The book revolves around four half-siblings as they each confront difficult ethical choices and navigate their relationships with an oppressive state, cultural expectations, and each other. While parts of the novel are carefully grounded in history—especially in the experience of Japanese-American incarceration during World War II—the book also crackles with modern culture and proves gaspingly relevant in an era of division and heightened surveillance.— Andrew R. Chow At the center of Nicole Cuffy's O Sinners! is Faruq Zaidi, a Brooklyn-based journalist grieving the recent death of his devout Muslim father. After learning about a cult called 'the nameless,' whose followers abide by teachings like "create beauty" and "do not despair at death," Faruq—a skeptic who has felt disconnected from faith and religion since he was a teenager—travels to their compound in the California Redwoods to report a story. But as he grows closer to the group's inscrutable leader, a Black Vietnam War veteran called Odo, Faruq begins to question more than just the secret inner-workings of the cult itself. O Sinners! is driven by three alternating narratives: Faruq's present day work trip, Odo's tour of duty in Vietnam, and the screenplay of a documentary about a legal battle between the cult and a fundamentalist church in Texas. In weaving together these stories, Cuffy explores the varying shapes that grief, belief, and belonging can take. —Erin McMullen In late October 2023, Omar El Akkad started to outline his feelings about the war in Gaza, and how it feels to be a person unanchored from home. In his urgent nonfiction debut, the writer—who was born in Cairo, grew up in Doha, moved to Canada, and now lives in rural Oregon—wrestles with his disillusionment with the West and its institutions, particularly given the indifference he's observed in so many as the war rages on. This memoir-manifesto could be seen as hopeless, and there is certainly no shortage of carnage in its pages. But, in the determination of those standing up for their beliefs, El Akkad manages to find hope amid the fantasy of Western liberalism.— Meg Zukin In Kevin Wilson's latest novel, Mad spends her days working on a farm with her mom. She hasn't seen her dad in two decades and she's settled into a routine that's not particularly fulfilling, but she's made her peace with that. Then, a stranger appears at her front door and announces that he's her older half-brother, and that their father pulled a disappearing act on not just him and Mad, but other families too. He convinces her to join him on a cross-country road trip to round up their other siblings and find their father. What ensues is an often hilarious and sometimes devastating exploration of what really makes a family. Like Wilson's other fiction, including Nothing to See Here and Now Is Not the Time to Panic, Run for the Hills gently tugs at the heart.— Annabel Gutterman Sky Daddy is a love story, but one we're willing to bet is unlike any love story you've previously encountered. Drawing inspiration from Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Kate Folk's debut novel revolves around one woman's pursuit of her own white whale: finding her aircraft 'soulmate.' That's really the premise: our eccentric protagonist, Linda, wants to fall in love with a plane—and, in a morbid twist, she wants to 'consummate' that relationship by dying in an aviation accident. Linda is a San Francisco transplant who makes $20 an hour moderating hate comments for a video-sharing platform and devotes as much of that meager salary as possible to exploring the aircraft dating pool by catching flights. Linda is determined to keep her unusual proclivities a secret, but after her work friend, Karina, invites her to a monthly 'Vision Board Brunch' with some old college friends, Linda's attempts to manifest her idea of romantic bliss end up setting her on a path to radical self-acceptance. Sky Daddy is as poignant as it is bizarre— Megan McCluskey The Tell, Amy Griffin Rarely, if ever, has a book been endorsed by all three titans in the celebrity book club world—Oprah, Reese Witherspoon, and Jenna Bush Hager—but Amy Griffin's The Tell is no ordinary memoir. For readers of Tara Westover's Educated or Chanel Miller's Know My Name, The Tell is one of those deeply personal stories that manages to feel universal at the same time. Griffin was thriving as a businesswoman and happily married mother of four in New York City when a session with an MDMA therapist flooded her mind with long-buried memories. Suddenly, she remembered the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of a teacher starting when she was 12 years old. Shattered and enraged, Griffin struggled to reconcile her past with her carefully constructed self-image and grappled with the weight of carrying such a harrowing secret. Her memoir retraces her steps through her private grief and isolating pursuit of justice, and, ultimately, her powerful realization that to tell is to heal.— Lucy Feldman After her teenage son James dies by suicide, Yiyun Li begins writing. It's what she knows how to do. The prolific author has, tragically, been in this position before. Her older son, Vincent, died by suicide in 2017. In her transcendent new book, she writes that she does not ruminate on grief, because to grieve suggests a process to which there is an end. She knows that to continue living is to accept that she will be a parent to her children for the rest of her life. In sparing prose that cuts deeply, Li examines the relationship between language and loss, honoring the sons who she carries with her, always.— Annabel Gutterman Emma Pattee's Tilt is an apocalyptic nightmare come to life. Annie is nine months pregnant and shopping at Ikea when Oregon is hit with 'the big one'—the earthquake that people in the Pacific Northwest have been anticipating for years. Pattee's thrilling debut tracks Annie's journey through rubble, chaos, hope, and despair as she searches for her husband amid the disaster. Tilt is a propulsive account of survival, and how humanity shows up under the pressure of a catastrophe. As she treks across Portland, Annie flashes back to moments that shed light on her life choices thus far. Her marriage and career are thrust under a microscope as she encounters others in crisis: the wounded, the searching, the lost, and the desperate. Best read in one sitting, Tilt is a raw examination of motherhood and its most extreme demands.— Meg Zukin
New York Times
12-03-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Amid a Dust Storm and a Depression, 5 Pioneers Reap What They've Sown
On the first day of his second presidential term, Donald Trump signed an executive order challenging birthright citizenship, a right that has been enshrined in the United States Constitution via the 14th Amendment since 1868. Defending the order in the Supreme Court days later, Trump's Justice Department cited an 1866 act that excluded Native Americans from birthright citizenship (Congress granted it to all Native Americans in 1924). In other words, Trump wants to exclude the first people on this land from the benefits of this land. Who gets to enjoy the bounty of America? It's an old question, but one that proves evergreen in our history. The theme is taken up with great passion and insight in Karen Russell's new novel, 'The Antidote,' which takes place in the fictional town of Uz, Neb., as Americans across the Great Plains are reeling from the Depression. The novel opens in the aftermath of the Black Sunday dust storm of April 14, 1935, when a sunny afternoon suddenly turned darker than night, and the entire region became known as the Dust Bowl. The pioneers who'd colonized the region in the mid-19th century had worked the land until it died, which, combined with severe drought, had left the soil vulnerable to erosion by strong winds. The uprooting of native grasses for more farming only sped up the destruction. This is the backdrop of Russell's novel: The promising days are over, and people are now facing the consequences. Like Russell's beloved earlier fiction — 'St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves' (2005), 'Swamplandia!' (2011), 'Vampires in the Lemon Grove' (2013) — 'The Antidote' blends speculative and fantasy elements with rich language and vivid characters in an effort not to escape reality but to comment even more thoughtfully on it. How do you comprehend the enormity of an entire region of crops suddenly dying? All the lives upended, seemingly overnight? Sometimes you need to invoke the impossible to capture the truth. At the heart of the novel's ample cast is a character known as the prairie witch, whose role in Uz is to act as one of many 'Vaults' for everything its people want to forget. For generations she has been 'absorbing and storing my customers' memories,' she says, from 'banking secrets' to 'sins and crimes, first and last times, nights of unspeakable horror.' Why might this town — and this nation — choose to forget its past? As the prairie witch puts it, 'It's rarely the truth itself that people can't accept. It's how they feel about it.' Rounding out the cast are the Sheriff, 'a stupid man' who is a 'savant at torture'; Asphodel 'Dell' Oletsky, a 15-year-old girl who loves basketball and is grieving her mother's unsolved murder; her Uncle Harp, a wheat farmer who took in Dell after his sister's death; Cleo Allfrey, a Black photographer for F.D.R.'s Resettlement Administration who is charged with documenting life across the Great Plains, to 'make the case for Roosevelt's New Deal,' she says. Lastly, there is the literal scarecrow on Harp's land who is inhabited by a spirit that remains a mystery to us until the end of the book. Each of these five characters orbits and is changed by the prairie witch in distinct and surprising ways. Less of a single, linear narrative than a multidimensional accretion of detail, 'The Antidote' submerges the reader in these characters' inner lives and histories through short, dense chapters that alternate between their perspectives. Russell's lyrical writing dazzles on every page. The larger story, the great thematic concern of the book, comes into focus about halfway through, when the prairie witch realizes that she, her ancestors and her community have all played a part in this violent national project. 'I hadn't known — no one had ever told me — that I was a soldier in a war,' she says. 'We newcomers to the Great Plains were invited out here by the U.S. government to hold ground. The Homestead Act, the Dawes Act, all part of a battle plan.' That forcible ground transfer of property — 'putting Native lands into White hands. Putting forests and plains into production. Turning soil into cash' — was not light work, nor was it peaceful. And another battle, to speak honestly about what was and is still being done to the land and its people, is ongoing. Russell's ambitious and exciting novel, like all good historical fiction, makes a powerful case for never forgetting. Erasure is a form of combat, but so is remembering.
CBS News
09-03-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
Book excerpt: "The Antidote" by Karen Russell
We may receive an affiliate commission from anything you buy from this article. Karen Russell, the bestselling author of "Swamplandia!" and "Vampires in the Lemon Grove," returns with a magical new novel, "The Antidote" (available March 11 from Knopf), a Nebraska Dust Bowl-era tale of a prairie witch, who stores the memories that townsfolk don't want to carry. And with farms going bankrupt and a string of murders terrifying the town, there are lots of things these people don't want to remember. $27 at Amazon Try Audible for free Prologue Deposit 69818060-1-77 Harp Oletsky's First Memory It is nowhere you chose to be, and yet here you are. Papa steers your shoulders into the heart of the jack drive. Hundreds of rabbits stare at you through the wire around the fence posts. It feels like looking into the mirror. They do not want to be in this story either. Men have been working since dawn to herd the wild jacks into this pen. The town has gathered to solve the problem of the rabbits, who chew through rangeland and cropland, who eat the golden wheat your papa turns into money. Worse than the locusts, says Papa. Every hide brings a penny bounty. So many turnipy sweating bodies and a festive feeling in the air like a penny rubbed between two fingers, like blood shocked into a socket. A smell that reminds you of the room where babies are born. When you try to turn and run away, Papa grabs you. There's Mr. O'Malley, Mr. Waldowko, Mr. Zalewski, Mrs. Haage. You can't remember any more names. A hundred jointed arms come swinging into the pen that is alive with jackrabbits, the place of no escape. Now there is only madness. Terror of cudgels, terror of ax handles and hammers, terror of being trampled. "Papa! Help! Stop!" Rabbits run over your feet. "Settle down, Harp— " Papa is angry. He pours your name over your head like scalding water. The rabbits are angry. The rabbits are crying and dying, the clubs coming down, down, down. "If you ain't gonna help, stay clear of us, boy— " You are six today. Your family will have a party after supper. The cake was cooling when you left for town. You feel sick thinking about it. Cherries come slopping out of the rabbits. Gray skins are splitting, slipping under bootheels and wooden bats. Papa shows you what to target: the skulls and the spines of the screaming jacks. It's the fastest way to stop their screaming. There is another way, a voice cries out inside you. Smash it flat. You watch Papa click into his rhythm and begin to kill alongside the rest of the men. You meet your baby sister's gaze through the fan of her clean fingers. Lada is sitting on your mother's lap. Three girls you know are watching from outside the fence. The girls are allowed to squeal and shield their faces. You wish you were a girl with them. Down, down, down come the clubs and the planks. Your stomach bulges and flattens. You are screaming with the rabbits. Your birthday wish is to get to the end of this sound. Quiet comes at last. The men's arms rest against their sides like tools in a shed. Women are hanging the dead jacks to dry by their long ears. Every twitching rabbit's foot has stilled. Inside of you, the screaming continues. It goes on and on and on. Papa finds you where you have hidden your eyes behind your hands, your tears inside your palms. "We can't let the jacks overrun the whole prairie. No one likes it, Son." This is a lie. Many had liked it. You shut your eyes along with the dead rabbits, because you did not want to see whose faces were smiling. "Here," says Papa. "One is still living. You cannot be softhearted, Harp." Your father puts the club in your hands. And after that, you are always afraid. From "The Antidote" by Karen Russell. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Karen Russell. Get the book here: $27 at Amazon $30 at Barnes & Noble Buy locally from
Los Angeles Times
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Karen Russell's Dust Bowl ‘Antidote' is even more ambitious than ‘Swamplandia!'
It takes an unconventional fabulist to address something so vast as American history. Karen Russell is known for surreal storytelling and fantastic language in work marked by slanted perspective and outlandish scenarios which illuminate dormant truths. She's brought her skills to bear on acclaimed short fiction collections and her one previous novel, the 2012 Pulitzer Prize finalist, 'Swamplandia!' While that novel chronicled the decline of a Floridian carnival family clinging to family legend and land, her new novel, 'The Antidote,' looks westward to the fictional Nebraska town of Uz during the 1930s. Russell's Uz is a desolate, ravaged Dust Bowl town where farmers have lost their crops and residents have perished thanks to extreme weather. A string of murdered women adds to the paranoia gripping the town. Understandably, many of its remaining residents flee this wasteland. Those left behind are a desperate lot: A renegade sheriff takes the law into his own hands. Teenage girls find solace playing basketball on a dwindling team without a coach. Uncomfortably so, a bachelor second-generation farmer finds himself with the only thriving crop in town. And drunks find comfort at the bar in the Country Jentleman. Upstairs from the bar in the boarding house, lost souls confess their secrets to a prairie witch named the Antidote. Their confessions are known as deposits, complete with a numbered slip. This transaction reduces the prairie witch into 'a room for rent. A vault to store the things people cannot stand to know, or bear. To forget.' Removed from the community and yet an integral part of it, the Antidote is an orphaned Sicilian immigrant named Antonina Rossi who knows that 'pain is never any one thing, it is always moving.' This prairie witch's origin story is rooted in the loss of her only son and escape from the abusive home for unwed mothers where she was forced to wait out her pregnancy and give birth. All too familiar with the psychic weight of secrets, the Antidote remarks that 'Memories are living things. When you house as many as I did, your bones begin to creak.' The caustic nature of memory and secrets seizes Russell's fascination. Historians and biographers work around archival gaps to delicately stitch together suppressed histories, but fiction writers can take more creative liberties to reconcile the past. As history becomes more threatened by censorship, fiction helps shape public discourse. Enter the new relevance of historical novels: Examples include Honorée Fanonne Jeffers' 'The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois' and Daniel Mason's 'North Woods,' which each tackle expansive themes across contentious historical periods. Most directly, 'The Antidote' harkens to Eleanor Catton's Booker award winning 'The Luminaries,' which centers around the mysteries of a gold rush port town in New Zealand. Both books are rife with mystery and the spoils of greed. All these books ask their readers to juggle multiple plot threads and a cascade of characters. Their success is dependent on sustaining your fascination for secrets behind the surface. Big books make enormous demands: Readers tend to love them or hate them. And while Russell's career took off thanks to the universally riotous praise for her short stories, I'd argue that she takes even bigger risks in her novels. They offer a more complicated and thus greater reward. With crackling pastoral language and thematic Lynchian undertones, 'Swamplandia!' probed the growing tension in Russell's home state of Florida between an endangered fecund wilderness and encroaching development. In it, her young heroine remarks, 'At ten, I couldn't articulate much but I got the message: to be a true historian, you had to mourn amply and well.' Russell has taken these words to heart. With 'The Antidote,' Russell raises the stakes of her efforts as a novelist. Gripped by the legacy of land theft and the forced migration of Native Americans, Russell constructed a novel underpinned by an elaborate embroidery of social, geological, historical, and environmental research on the impact of American Western expansion. She speaks to this extensive work in an author's note and a land lost acknowledgment. Her prairie witch carries the moral burdens of a bankrupt society that shames women and strips the land of its resources as well as its native inhabitants, leaving little for those left behind. Russell could have written a smaller, less ambitious, book centered only around the Antidote and her immediate clients. However, drawing from her skills as a short story writer, she effortlessly weaves in other characters whose unique gifts shed light on the lacunae of history. Cleo Allfrey is a WPA photographer and somewhat androgynous Black woman assigned to document the West. Despite the strict guidelines that steer her work into the realm of propaganda, her work is something beyond commercial art. What develops in the darkroom are visions that speak to the possibility of a harmonious future, signal to a prosperous past, and highlight present horrors. The memories she captures are tangible in ways that the Antidote's are not. Each woman recognizes the mercurial power of memories. Together, they find sanctuary on the only unblemished farmland in Uz, which belongs to Harp and Dell Oletsky. If this sounds like a dense novel, you're only halfway right. The book is threaded with more subplots and histories as well as characters than I can elaborate upon here. However, her sharp narrative grasp guides the reader from character to character as the book unfolds. Russell's vivid characters retain an element of mystery, which speaks to the novel's larger point. History makes clear the gap between what we know and what we can only presume to be true. Russell is at her strongest in moments of intimacy — be it maternal or conventionally romantic. There's an awkward and unspoken bond between her band of misfits. Independent of one another, they're untethered and grossly misunderstood. As a unified front, they manage to reveal the town's most sinister mysteries. Harp, the lone man among this chosen crew, reflects: 'Anything that is yours alone can become a curse, even good fortune. This understanding hit me with the force of revelation. Words alone won't do it justice.' Russell works with imagined backstories and harsh facts to draw connections between unexplained phenomena like extreme weather and inexplicable cruelty. Just as Allfrey's photographs were 'crowded with lifetimes,' so is Russell's novel, a work suffused with the 'mystery of kindness' and the banality of violence. LeBlanc is a board member of the National Book Critics Circle.
