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About The Antidote:
The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust bowl drought but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a "Prairie Witch,” whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples’ memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate. Russell's novel is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.
Karen Russell is the author of six books of fiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. She has received MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Born and raised in Miami, Florida, she now lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband, son, and daughter. The Antidote is her second novel.
Rebecca Clarren has been writing about the American West for more than twenty-five years. Her journalism, for which she has won a Whiting Non-Fiction Grant, the Hillman Prize, an Alicia Patterson Fellowship and ten grants from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, has appeared in The Nation, Indian Country Today and High Country News. Her novel Kickdown was shortlisted for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Her most recent work, The Cost of Free Land, published in October 2023 by Viking/Penguin, was named a Best Book of 2023 by Kirkus Reviews, The Forward, Christian Science Monitor, and The Tribal College Journal. The book was chosen as a One Book North Dakota and a One Book South Dakota. It won the Will Rogers Medallion Award and was a finalist for the Great Plains Book Award, the High Plains Book Award and Stanford's William Saroyan Prize for International Writing. Rebecca lives in Portland with her husband and two kids.
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