The Antidote is a gripping dust bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town
Yay LitStackers! Get ready to add another title to your “TBR” list! The Antidote by Karen Russell is in presale and generating serious buzz. This novel from Knopf set for publication March 11, 2025, has early readers buzzing. We’ve sneaked in through the basement and show you what’s on the book cover, from the publisher’s official description to the early reviews that suggest this book is one you want to pre-order today. Here we go!
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In This Spotlight On The Antidote
About The Antidote
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.
Praise for The Antidote
“…The Antidote soars with exigent joy and laugh-out-loud scenes, with memory witches and enchanted cameras and the world’s most lovable sentient scarecrow. It’s magic, a book doing this big work and also making it propulsive, eminently readable. If irony bypasses the difficulty of describing things, then the vivid sincerity on display here marks a virtuosic artist at the height of her lucidity. Russell has rendered with soul and urgency the vast inexpressible ache at the heart of American gratitude.”—Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!
“Karen Russell runs her imaginative strings across dark caverns of our history so those spaces can sound their own songs. The Antidote lets us see the perils and possibilities of storytelling, illuminating its powers to erase, discover, reconstruct, prop up, terrorize, delight, and collapse. Russell is truly one of the greatest writers of our time. And then also: every page is pocked with joy, beauty, wildness and the perfect wisdom of mystery.”—Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch
“The Antidote is an achingly gorgeous book about dust, memory, basketball, murder, yearning, photography, and the way the land holds both the memory of what went before and the dreams of what may come. Karen Russell is one of our most humane and generous writers; this book is as profound as it is wonderfully strange.”—Lauren Groff, author of The Vaster Wilds
“This novel swept me up and carried me away, even while somehow burying me, and digging up something about the story of this country I didn’t know I needed to know. As with all of Russell’s work, heaviness and levity are always kept in balance, and so I was lifted even while being devastated by the book’s many brutal truths and stark beauty. …Finishing the book I felt completely covered in the forgotten dust of what too few look back on, with rare clarity, not to mention the intricate braid of narratives masterfully woven here…”—Tommy Orange, author of Wandering Stars
“Here in The Antidote, Karen Russel has summoned her singular brand of alchemy and created an epic of heart and devastation, community and laughter, death and life. A book that has it all. An absolute wonder.”—Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Chain-Gang All-Stars
“Russell’s prose is something to be savored. …It’s a novel that asks the reader to sit with discomfort, to walk alongside its characters as they confront their unresolved histories. Russell navigates these emotional landscapes with care and respect and the distinct gift she carries that is heaven—I mean Love.”—Morgan Talty, author of Fire Exit
“With The Antidote, Karen Russell proves once again that there is no limit to her extraordinary imagination. She creates marvels out of what we imagine to be the ordinary world, she turns the historical novel upside down and shakes from it a thing of exquisite beauty that is unlike anything you’ve ever read.”—Dinaw Mengestu, author of Someone Like Us
“While, thankfully, there is no such thing as The Great American Novel (singular), there is a body of work by various novelists which reckon with our past — its mythologies, its myriad histories, its tragedies, its secret archives and its future possibilities. The Antidote is a remarkable addition to this communal, never-ending project. Karen Russell’s novel is generous, profound, and will stay with me for a long time.”—Kelly Link, author of The Book of Love
“An ardent work of encompassing and compassionate historical fiction supercharged with her signature imaginative, astutely calibrated supernatural twists. A dramatic and uncanny tale of the drastic consequences of our destruction of nature and Indigenous communities.”—Booklist (starred review)
“A singular, haunting vision that fearlessly excavates the past and challenges the reader to face the future head-on. A storytelling tour de force that lives up to the promise of its name.”—Kirkus (starred review)
“An inspired and unforgettable fusion of the gritty and the fantastic.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
About Karen Russell, Author of The Antidote
Photo by Dan Hawk
KAREN RUSSELL is the author of five books of fiction, including Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has received two National Magazine Awards for Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, the 2023 Bottari Lattes Grinzane prize, the 2024 Mary McCarthy Award, and was selected for the National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35” prize and The New Yorker‘s “20 under 40” list.
She has taught literature and creative writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the University of California-Irvine, Williams College, Columbia University, and Bryn Mawr College, and was the Endowed Chair of Texas State’s MFA program. She serves on the board of Street Books, a mobile-library for people living outdoors. Born and raised in Miami, Florida, she now lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband, son, and daughter.
You can connect with Karen Russell on her website, and learn more about her on wikipedia.
Source: Publisher
Publisher: Knopf
Pub Date: Mar 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780593802250
Titles by Karen Russell
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