It’s a thrill to welcome acclaimed writer Karen Russell to the California Book Club this Thursday, May 15, to discuss Claire Vaye Watkins’s lyrical dystopian novel Gold Fame Citrus. We hope you’ve had a chance to read this one, but if you haven’t, you’re in for a treat—it’s one of the most intriguing fictions out there about the magnetism of cult leaders and what it might mean for the allure and promise of California to be flipped on its head—a question we’re already watching play out in real time, as those from wildly expensive coastal areas move to other cities around the West.
Russell is the author of six books of fiction. These include Swamplandia!, a lush and voluptuously imaginative novel, and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, about a family of alligator wrestlers in Florida, and most recently the innovative novel The Antidote, which gathers a range of characters around a prairie witch who banks memories. The latter is set in the fictional town Uz (calling up an association with Oz) in 1930s Nebraska after the Black Sunday dust storm destroyed the agricultural promise of the region that would come to be called the Dust Bowl. Like Gold Fame Citrus, the novel features a natural disaster as a catalyst for drama.
Russell burst onto the literary scene in 2007 with St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, 10 stories often from the point of view of girls and young women. Since then, she’s published two other gorgeously rendered short story collections that explore fantastical premises, Vampires in the Lemon Grove and Orange World. In the former, one standout is “Reeling for the Empire,” the story of women who’ve been sold for the purpose of making them part silkworm caterpillar so that they can produce silk for Japan. All three collections include some of the most richly painted, genre-bending worlds you’ll read about within contemporary short fiction. Russell has also written a novella, Sleep Donation, which is set in a time and place where a fatal insomnia plague leads to people donating sleep to sufferers.
Russell has received numerous recognitions, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the NYPL’s Young Lions Fiction Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 award, and early in her career, she was selected as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists and named to the New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” list. Her honors include National Magazine Awards for Fiction, a Shirley Jackson Award, the 2023 Bottari Lattes Grinzane Prize, and the 2024 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. She has taught literature and creative writing at several universities and serves on the board of Street Books, which provides library services to help those who live on the margins.
Be sure to make the Gold Fame Citrus “booktail” this Thursday, and if you missed it, be sure to read John Freeman’s powerful long-form essay about the novel. Pick up another book by Watkins (Battleborn, I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness) and one by Russell for the coming weeks. We hope you’re looking forward to joining these brilliant authors for the upcoming California Book Club gathering—it’s bound to be a memorable event.•
Join us on May 15 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Watkins will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Russell to discuss Gold Fame Citrus. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
REFRESHING “BOOKTAIL”
Mix Lindsay Merbaum’s vodka-based Gold Fame Citrus cocktail for Thursday evening’s CBC gathering. —Alta
MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE
Read Alta contributing editor David L. Ulin’s profile of Claire Hoffman in connection with her book Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson. —Alta
MONTANA IN THE ’70S
Read “Renaissance, MT,” a beautiful short story about a gifted boy who loves Renaissance art, by author Bridget Quinn. —Alta
IMPOSSIBLE TASK
Read about the survey responses that went into choosing the 25 top California novels discussed in Alta’s Issue 31. —Alta
“FOREVER”
Judy Blume’s novels are now hot commodities in Hollywood. —Los Angeles Times
SUPPORT A CBC PARTNER
Alongside other arts organizations, our partner, the San Francisco magazine Zyzzyva, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that turns 40 this year, lost its National Endowment for the Arts funding recently. The magazine is fundraising. —Zyzzyva
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