The Antidote

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR FICTION • LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD • WINNER OF THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST BOOK AWARD • THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE

NAMED A NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Time, Esquire, PEN America, People, Scientific America, LitHub, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Globe and Mail, Portland Monthly, Kirkus, BookPage

“Direct and intimate. . . . [The Antidote] turns the whispered secrets of a Dust Bowl town into a bold metaphor for repressed history.” —The Atlantic

“The Antidote blends speculative and fantasy elements with rich language and vivid characters in an effort not to escape reality but to comment even more thoughtfully on it. . . . Russell’s lyrical writing dazzles on every page.” —The New York Times

“Spellbinding. . . . In The Antidote, Karen Russell, America’s own Prairie Witch of a writer, exhumes memories out of the collective national unconscious and invites us to see our history in full. There are, alas, no antidotes for history. Our consolations are found in writers like Russell who refract horror and wonder through their own strange looking glass, leaving us energized for that next astounding thing.” —NPR

“To embark on the adventure of reading The Antidote is to place yourself under the enchanting and challenging care of a writer who is guilty of actual witchcraft.” —The Washington Post

“[The Antidote] is an allegory for the current climate crisis, a reckoning with America’s racist beginnings, and an urgent warning against historical erasure.” —TIME

“The most salient quality of The Antidote is the beauty and power of Russell’s writing. . . . The Antidote is clearly the work of a writer with prodigious gifts.” —The Guardian

“Russell’s prose is as sharp as ever. Her capacity for detailed imagery while maintaining an easy, readable pace must be commended. Conceptually, her imagination stands head and shoulders above her peers, which is no surprise to any Karen Russell reader. . . . This book is wholly unique and represents one of the modern greats continuing to challenge herself.” —Chicago Review of Books

“Drawing from her skills as a short story writer, [Russell] effortlessly weaves in other characters whose unique gifts shed light on the lacunae of history. . . . Her sharp narrative grasp guides the reader from character to character as the book unfolds.” —Los Angeles Times

“A haunting novel that’s as speculative as it is timeless.” —People Magazine

“A contribution to the continuing project of imagining the Dust Bowl, American immigration, and the New Deal, The Antidote is a strong and colorful antitoxin for rigid monochromal thinking.” —Arts Alive San Antonio

“The Antidote is gorgeous and inventive storytelling, literature at its finest.” —Willamette Week

“In The Antidote, Karen Russell writes indelible characters who keep choosing messy community over silo’d righteousness, motion over despair. She presents for inspection America’s most persistent chorus of moral self-defense, “Better them than us,” and shows how it rots the minds, hearts, and land of all who sing it. Only Karen Russell could write a dust bowl opus with such raucous brio—The Antidote soars with exigent joy and laugh-out-loud scenes, with memory witches and enchanted cameras and the world’s most lovable sentient scarecrow. It’s magic, a book doing this big work and also making it propulsive, eminently readable. If irony bypasses the difficulty of describing things, then the vivid sincerity on display here marks a virtuosic artist at the height of her lucidity. Russell has rendered with soul and urgency the vast inexpressible ache at the heart of American gratitude.” —Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!

“Karen Russell runs her imaginative strings across dark caverns of our history so those spaces can sound their own songs. The Antidote lets us see the perils and possibilities of storytelling, illuminating its powers to erase, discover, reconstruct, prop up, terrorize, delight, and collapse. Russell is truly one of the greatest writers of our time. And then also: every page is packed with joy, beauty, wildness and the perfect wisdom of mystery.” —Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

“The Antidote is an achingly gorgeous book about dust, memory, basketball, murder, yearning, photography, and the way the land holds both the memory of what went before and the dreams of what may come. Karen Russell is one of our most humane and generous writers; this book is as profound as it is wonderfully strange.” —Lauren Groff, author of The Vaster Wilds

“This novel swept me up and carried me away, even while somehow burying me, and digging up something about the story of this country I didn’t know I needed to know. As with all of Russell’s work, heaviness and levity are always kept in balance, and so I was lifted even while being devastated by the book’s many brutal truths and stark beauty. I’d already considered Russell’s vivid and inventive imagination to be endless, but here exploring a history of Nebraska we get an unearthing of this country’s still relatively untold origin story, the part about its original people, and the cost paid in order that this country might be formed. Finishing the book I felt completely covered in the forgotten dust of what too few look back on, with rare clarity, not to mention the intricate braid of narratives masterfully woven here. The Antidote is one, for an all too poisoned American narrative about land and family and belonging.” —Tommy Orange, author of Wandering Stars

“Here in The Antidote, Karen Russel has summoned her singular brand of alchemy and created an epic of heart and devastation, community and laughter, death and life. A book that has it all. An absolute wonder.” —Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Chain-Gang All-Stars

“Russell’s prose is something to be savored. Every sentence is meticulously crafted, each one revealing layers of meaning that draw you deeper into the narrative. Her language is both lush and sharp, weaving a dreamlike quality into the story that makes the characters’ emotional journeys feel all the more visceral. Memory is both the poison and the cure here, something that simultaneously traps and liberates the characters. They move through their world with the weight of what’s unspoken pressing down on them. It’s a novel that asks the reader to sit with discomfort, to walk alongside its characters as they confront their unresolved histories. Russell navigates these emotional landscapes with care and respect and the distinct gift she carries that is heaven—I mean Love.” —Morgan Talty, author of Fire Exit

“With The Antidote, Karen Russell proves once again that there is no limit to her extraordinary imagination. She creates marvels out of what we imagine to be the ordinary world, she turns the historical novel upside down and shakes from it a thing of exquisite beauty that is unlike anything you’ve ever read.” —Dinaw Mengestu, author of Someone Like Us

“While, thankfully, there is no such thing as The Great American Novel (singular), there is a body of work by various novelists which reckon with our past — its mythologies, its myriad histories, its tragedies, its secret archives and its future possibilities. The Antidote is a remarkable addition to this communal, never-ending project. Karen Russell’s novel is generous, profound, and will stay with me for a long time.” —Kelly Link, author of The Book of Love

“An ardent work of encompassing and compassionate historical fiction supercharged with her signature imaginative, astutely calibrated supernatural twists. A dramatic and uncanny tale of the drastic consequences of our destruction of nature and Indigenous communities.” —Booklist (starred review)

“A singular, haunting vision that fearlessly excavates the past and challenges the reader to face the future head-on. A storytelling tour de force that lives up to the promise of its name.” —Kirkus (starred review)

“An inspired and unforgettable fusion of the gritty and the fantastic.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Readers of Margaret Atwood, Emily St. John Mandel, Edan Lepucki, and Lidia Yuknavitch will appreciate Russell’s brilliant, barbed excavation of an all-too-imaginable future.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“A deeply imagined blend of gritty realism and alluring fantasy. . . . Russell has created both a tender story of how our memories sustain us in the face of significant loss and a frank reckoning with a painful period of American history.” —Shelf Awareness