Swamplandia!

A triumphant debut novel and follow-up to Karen Russellrs"s universally acclaimed short story collectionSt. Lucyrs"s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. The Bigtree alligator wrestling dynasty is in decline-think Buddenbrooksset in the Florida Everglades-and Swamplandia!, their island home and gator-wrestling theme park, is swiftly being encroached upon by a sophisticated competitor known as the World of Darkness. Ava, a resourceful but terrified twelve, must manage seventy gators and the vast, inscrutable landscape of her own grief. Her mother, Swamp landia!rs"s legendary headliner, has just died; her sister is having an affair with a ghost called the Dredgeman; her brother has secretly defected to the World of Darkness in a last-ditch effort to keep their sinking family afloat; and her father, Chief Bigtree, is AWOL. To save her family, Ava must journey on her own to a perilous part of the swamp called the Underworld, a harrowing odyssey from which she emerges a true heroine. Selected as one ofGrantars"sBest Young American Novelists, Karen Russell is an irrepressible new voice in contemporary fiction. From the Hardcover edition.

Karen Russell, a native of Miami, has been featured in The New Yorker’s debut fiction issue. She is a graduate of the Columbia MFA program and is the 2005 recipient of the Transatlantic Review/Henfield Foundation Award and was chosen as one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 in 2009. Her fiction has recently appeared in Conjunctions, Granta, Zoetrope, and Oxford American. Twenty-eight years old, she lives in New York City.