Karen Russell, y'all

You guys are all probably sick of hearing about her, but she seriously rocks my socks. She writes with tons of energy and boldness. Her narration is both hilarious and fun; she captures the goofiness and magic of childhood really well. A few of my favorite excerpts from Swamplandia!:

"sproingingly" [adv.]

Every gator in the Bigtree family's alligator park is named Seth. Here is one of the sweatshirts they sell at the gift shop. "This is what the sweatshirt said: 'STOP IN THE NAME OF SETH, BEFORE HE EATS YOUR HEART.' So far as I knew, nobody in the history of our gift store transactions had ever exchanged legal tender for one."

The narrator's brother, Kiwi Bigtree, gets a summer job at an amusement park called the World of Darkness. Re his uniform: "'Wait, they made me pay for this shirt?' Kiwi stared down at his chest, which glowed like a barbecue coal. 'Is that hopefully against some law?'  This uniform was starchy, ill-fitting. It had a huge puffy flame exploding out of it. 'Like a blister,' Kiwi told Scott. Kiwi was no expert, but it seemed like the World of Darkness employees should be the ones receiving extra money to wear these suits. Yvans liked to jog around the ladies in his outfit and blow into an invisible whistle. 'Margaret!' he'd shout. 'Look! I am the referee for a girls' soccer game in hell!'"

Relating the life story of a ghost the characters encounter: "The doctor lit a Turkish cigarette and let out a little cry, a sadness that registered in decibels somewhere between a gambler's sigh and the poor woman's grief-mad wailing at the end of her labor--and then another cry joined the doctor's. The stillborn's blue face opened like a flower and he started crying even harder, unequivocally alive now, unabashedly breathing, making good progress toward becoming Louis. The baby's face kept reddening by the second, and the doctor plucked the cigarette from his lips like a tar carnation. He would have liked to keep on smoking, and drinking, too, but babies--you could not just stand there and toast their voyage back to nothingness! Although. If the room had been emptied of witnesses, no nurses, no mother, just this baby's squalling eyes, and your own...? Could you maybe then...? No, the better doctor inside the doctor insisted. We can't do that. So the doc put on his self-prescribed green eyeglasses and massaged air into the baby's chest with the flats of his hands; and when blood and air started to work in tandem and the midnight pigments in Louis's bunched-sock face brightened to a yellowish pink, the doc stared down at the baby and said, 'Well, pal, I think you made the right choice.' The mother's cracked heels were by this time cooling to putty on the table."

Two paragraphs later, he's taken in at the foundling hospital: "Louis lost his true past in a few squeaks of her nun shoes on the linoleum."

"the chief, whose voice rumbled like a washing machine full of shoes"

"pinball-whizzing" [v.]

There are tons more, you guys. Also, since this is her later work, she's "grown up" a little, aka gotten a little more sophisticated, ie less crazy-funny since her short stories, which I think are awesome too.

Quotations all from Russell, Karen. Swamplandia! New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.