Acclaimed new novel is a reckoning, unearthing horrors and shimmering possibilities
interview by Cathy Carroll
Karen Russell’s latest novel, The Antidote, is her first since Swamplandia!, one of The New York Times’ ten best books of the year and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has received many awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship and The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” list (she is now 43). Russell, who lives in Portland, also serves on the board of Street Books, a mobile library and community space for people living outside or at the margins in Portland.
What drove you to incorporate magical elements with brutal historical realities?
I’m sure my early reading history has a lot to do with it, as does growing up in Miami, where long before I knew how to read I learned how many streaming realities can coexist on a single city block. As a reader, I’ve always been drawn to genre-bending and genreblending works. When I’m helping students who want to write speculative fiction, I often share Flannery O’Connor’s elegant dictum: “The truth is not distorted here, rather a distortion is used to get at truth.” It’s been a guiding light for me as well, from my earliest attempts at writing fiction.
In The Antidote, I did feel driven to incorporate the fantastical conceit of the prairie witches, the camera that can see across the plains of time, and I was driven by something mysterious! I felt hauled along by this book, sometimes more of its servant and less of its author.
The Antidote ultimately finds room for hope. What do you see as the “antidote” in the novel? What kind of hope, if any, does it offer readers facing our own era’s storms?
I thought of the title as both earnest and wry; on the one hand, “The Antidote” is the name of a prairie witch who sells oblivion as a panacea, with disastrous consequences. But there’s also a genuine longing for justice and healing that each and all of these characters experience, and their transformation from strangers into collaborators and friends echoes what has happened to me, outside this book. In the author’s note and acknowledgements, I name some of the many people whose voices and visions are woven throughout the novel and who have changed my own life for the better, people with whom I’m still collaborating in different ways. There isn’t any single antidote, but part of what this book helped me to more deeply understand is that many of the solutions we are seeking to our climate emergency are already here, some of the most powerful ones in the ground under our feet; biodiverse soil has a tremendously powerful role to play in a healing, cooling world. We have the tools and the knowledge to help nature to heal, and we also have the ability to envision a future that is premised on different values.
Another deep gift of this book was meeting people who are not waiting for the federal government to take the lead on reparations and restorations, like the descendants of settlers in Nebraska who have returned land to the Ponca and the Pawnee Nations. I now feel connected to a network of people working for a more just world, and it does give me hope to imagine with them on a longer timeline than our own lifetimes.
Like Harp Oletsky, I have been trying to shift out of a stance of despair, denial, cynicism, evasion of responsibility and resignation (“What choice do I have?”) and into collective action (“What choices do we have?”). Asking how we might begin to reckon with the past and reshape our shared future.
In early 2025, many people were sharing this wonderful quote from Octavia Butler: “I mean there’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers—at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.”
