Orange World and Other Stories

by Karen Russell

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to the MacArthur Foundation, for their life-changing gift and their support of my work.

  Thanks to Sam Chang, Connie Brothers, Kevin Brockmeier, and my Iowa Gill-Openers.

  Thanks to the Tin House family and to that green dream incubator, the Tin House Summer Workshop.

  Thanks to the MFA program in creative writing and the Department of English at Texas State University. It’s been an honor and a true pleasure to serve as the endowed chair.

  Big love and thanks to Tom and Jody Grimes—you make Texas feel like our home.

  Thank you to my students for putting up with my jokes, and for opening my eyes to so many new worlds in progress.

  Thank you to Willing Davidson, for your friendship and your invaluable help with these stories.

  Thank you, Deborah Treisman, for your terrific insights and suggestions.

  Thank you to my old pal and partner in weirdness, Michael Ray, for your brilliant edits.

  Thank you to Cheston Knapp for your peerless echolocation.

  Thank you to Denise Shannon, the world’s most amazing agent.

  Thank you to Jordan Pavlin, who sees right to the secret heart of things, and always lights the way for me.

  Thanks to Nicholas Thomson, Kathleen Fridella, Susan Bradanini Betz, Emily Reardon, John Gall, Kate Runde, Sara Eagle, Madeleine Denman, Kate Berner, Kim Thornton Ingenito, and the wonderful folks at Knopf and the RHSB.

  Thanks to Carey McHugh and Avery Gordon for permission to use lines from their excellent books, American Gramophone and Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, as my epigraphs.

  Andrew Moore, thank you for your photographs and particularly for Basset Cattle Auction, Rock County, Neb 2006.

  Doug Johnson, thank you for teaching me about the nuanced beauty, resilience, and fragility of the High Plains.

  A special thanks to the world’s best grandmothers, Janice Russell and Claire Perez, for making it possible for me to spend time with the tornadoes and the ghosts and finish this book.

  Thanks to Bruce Russell, Kent Russell, Lauren Russell, Alan and Fran Romanchuck, and my Perez family, for so much laughter and for the joy of this new chapter.

  Hey, friends: thanks for turning the pages with me. I love you.

  To Tony Perez and Oscar Perez, the great loves of my life: thank you for teaching me how to write such a happy story. T, thank you for spending so many hours dreaming and revising with me. This book is for you. I can’t wait to see what comes next.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  KAREN RUSSELL won the 2012 and the 2018 National Magazine Award for fiction, and her first novel, Swamplandia! (2011), was the winner of the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Cullman Center Fellowship, a 2012 Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin, and a 2013 MacArthur Fellowship, she lives with her husband and son in Portland, Oregon, and currently holds the Endowed Chair at Texas State’s MFA program.

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