![]() We spent our honeymoon hopping continents, hunting liquid chimeras: mint tea in Fez, coconut slurries in Oahu, jet-black coffee in Bogota, jackal’s mil in Dakar, Cherry Coke floats in rural Alabama, a thousand beverages purported to have magical quenching properties. We have lived everywhere: Tunis, Laos, Cincinnati, Salamanca. “Over the years, Magreb and I have tried everything,” Clyde says, “fangs in apples, fangs in rubber balls. The eponymous story follows Clyde and Magreb – a married couple – who resides in Sorrento, Italy, trying to contend with the impracticalities of being vampires by feasting on lemons instead of human blood. Russell takes the orthodox idea of the Gothic fable and turns it on its head, with humour, intelligence and linguistic gusto. Even the title of her new short story collection – Vampires in the Lemon Grove – requires some assimilation. Karen Russell’s imagination, however, stretches farther than most, from the plane of the surreal to the terrain of the absurd, from the wickedly magical to the downright supernatural. ![]() ![]() We dare to imagine things that are beyond the realm of possibility and probability, beyond the limits of convention and the likelihood of the everyday. This, I think, is largely true if we exclude imagination from the discussion. ![]() Joseph Conrad once said that there is nothing more fantastical than life. ![]()
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