“La-arry!” I was aware of Mondo calling to me from the twinkling roots of the oak, lit up all wild by the underworld flies, but I knew I couldn’t turn or climb out yet. Owls might come for Eric’s new rabbit in a rain of talons. City hawks. Something Worse. How long would I have to stand watch down here, I wondered, fighting off the birds, to make up for what I’d done to Eric Mutis? The rabbit bubbled serenely through the straw at my feet. Somewhere I think I must still be standing, just like that.
Acknowledgments
I am enormously grateful to the following people and institutions for their generous support: the Guggenheim Foundation; the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the New York Public Library Young Lions; the Bard Fiction Prize and the terrific Bard College crew; Daniel Torday, Robin Black, and the excellent students and faculty at Bryn Mawr; Mary Ellen von der Heyden; and The American Academy in Berlin and its extraordinary staff and Fellows.
Thank you to the editors and staffs of the following magazines and journals: Cheston Knapp and Michelle Wildgren at Tin House; John Freeman, Ellah Allfrey, and Fatema Ahmed at Granta; Michael Ray at Zoetrope; Willing Davidson at The New Yorker; Bradford Morrow at Conjunctions. I feel so lucky to have gotten to work with you, and these stories benefited tremendously from your keen reading and suggestions. I am indebted to Carin Besser for her enthusiasm and insight.
Thanks to Caroline Bleeke, Leslie Levine, Sara Eagle, Kate Runde, Kathleen Fridella, and the amazing teams at Knopf and Vintage. To Jordan Pavlin, my phenomenal and inspiring editor, and Denise Shannon, the world’s best agent. And a final thank-you, and big love, to the people who stuck it out with me once again:
To my family
&
To my friends
A Note About the Author
KAREN RUSSELL, a native of Miami, won the 2012 National Magazine Award for fiction, and her first novel, Swamplandia! (2011), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is a graduate of the Columbia MFA program, a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2012 Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. She lives in Philadelphia.
Other titles by Karen Russell available in eBook format
St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves 978-0-307-38763-9
Swamplandia! 978-0-307-59544-7
For more information, please visit
www.aaknopf.com
Karen Russell Vampires in the Lemon Grove: Reading Group Guide
About This Guide
The questions, discussion topics, and suggestions for further reading that follow are intended to enrich your discussion of Karen Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove.
About the Book
The author of the acclaimed short-story collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and the New York Times best seller and Pulitzer Prize finalist Swamplandia! delivers her best work yet, a virtuosic new story collection that finds her delving into dark new territory with her trademark exuberance and invention.
A dejected teenager believes that the universe is communicating with him through talismanic objects left behind in a seagull’s nest. Girls held captive in a silk factory slowly transmute into human silkworms, spinning delicate threads from their own bellies and escaping by seizing the means of production for their own revolutionary ends. A massage therapist discovers she has the power to heal by manipulating the tattoos on a war veteran’s torso. And in the collection’s marvelous title story, two vampires in a sun-drenched lemon grove try helplessly to slake their thirst for blood.
Questions for Discussion
1. Discuss the relationship between Clyde and Magreb, the two vampires in the title story whose hundred-year marriage is tested when one of them develops a fear of flying. Do you think the author believes they have a good marriage? What is the impact of Clyde’s inability to transmute? Consider this quote from the beginning of the story: “I once pictured time as a black magnifying glass and myself as a microscopic flightless insect trapped in that circle of night. But then Magreb came along, and eternity ceased to frighten me.” What is the author saying here about mortal — and immortal — love?
2. How might “Vampires in the Lemon Grove” be read as a parable of appetite and addiction? Note the linguistic forms in which the author couches references to the vampires’ need for blood.
3. “I blinked down at a little blond child and then saw that my two hands were shaking violently, soundlessly, like old friends wishing not to burden me with their troubles. I dropped the candies into the children’s bags, thinking: You small mortals don’t realize the power of your stories” (this page). What is the author saying here about the nature of truth, the power of myth, and the role of storytelling in shaping identity?
4. In “Reeling for the Empire,” Tooka asks, “Are we monsters now?” (this page) In the title story, Clyde reflects, “Magreb was the first and only other vampire I’d ever met. We bared our fangs over a tombstone and recognized each other. There is a loneliness that must be particular to monsters, I think, the feeling that each is the only child of a species. And now that loneliness was over.” (this page) How are Clyde and Magreb similar to the reelers? What do these two stories have in common thematically? What do you think the author might be trying to say here about exile and community, shape-shifting and transformation?
5. Look at the passage in “Reeling for the Empire” where Kitsune describes the phenomenon of the thread: “Here is the final miracle, I say: our silk comes out of us in colors. There is no longer any need to dye it. There is no other silk like it on the world market, boasts the Agent….Nobody has ever guessed her own color correctly — Hoshi predicted hers would be peach and it was blue; Nishi thought pink, got hazel. I would bet my entire five-yen advance that mine would be light gray, like my cat’s fur. But then I woke and pushed the swollen webbing of my thumb and a sprig of green came out. On my day zero, in the middle of my terror, I was surprised into a laugh: here was a translucent green I swore I’d never seen before anywhere in nature, and yet I knew it as my own on sight” (this page). How do you account for the joyfulness of this discovery? What do you think the author is trying to communicate about the nature of identity, and of our essential selves?