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The Antidote

A Novel

Author Karen Russell
Hardcover
$29.00 US
Knopf
0"W x 0"H x 0"D   | 23 oz | 12 per carton
On sale Mar 11, 2025 | 352 Pages | 978-0-593-80225-0
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From Pulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestselling author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove Karen Russell: a gripping Dust Bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town

The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl drought, but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a "Prairie Witch," whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples’ memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate.

Russell's novel is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.
© Dan Hawk
Karen Russell is the author of five books of fiction, including the NYT bestsellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. She is a MacArthur Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the recipient of two National Magazine Awards for Fiction, the NYPL's Young Lions Award, the National Book Foundation's 5 under 35 award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the 2023 Bottari Lattes Grinzane prize, the 2024 Mary McCarthy Award, among other honors. With composer Ellis Ludwig-Leone and choreographer and director Troy Schumacher, she co-created The Night Falls, listed as one of the NYT's Best Dance Performances of 2023. She has taught literature and creative writing as a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the University of California-Irvine, Williams College, Columbia University, and Bryn Mawr College, and served as the Endowed Chair of Texas State’s MFA program. She serves on the board of Street Books, a mobile-library that creates a community of support for unhoused Portlanders. Born and raised in Miami, FL, she now lives in Portland, OR with her husband, son, and daughter. View titles by Karen Russell

About

From Pulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestselling author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove Karen Russell: a gripping Dust Bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town

The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl drought, but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a "Prairie Witch," whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples’ memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate.

Russell's novel is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.

Author

© Dan Hawk
Karen Russell is the author of five books of fiction, including the NYT bestsellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. She is a MacArthur Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the recipient of two National Magazine Awards for Fiction, the NYPL's Young Lions Award, the National Book Foundation's 5 under 35 award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the 2023 Bottari Lattes Grinzane prize, the 2024 Mary McCarthy Award, among other honors. With composer Ellis Ludwig-Leone and choreographer and director Troy Schumacher, she co-created The Night Falls, listed as one of the NYT's Best Dance Performances of 2023. She has taught literature and creative writing as a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the University of California-Irvine, Williams College, Columbia University, and Bryn Mawr College, and served as the Endowed Chair of Texas State’s MFA program. She serves on the board of Street Books, a mobile-library that creates a community of support for unhoused Portlanders. Born and raised in Miami, FL, she now lives in Portland, OR with her husband, son, and daughter. View titles by Karen Russell

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