The Antidote by Karen Russell

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.

REVIEWS

“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

PRODUCT DETAILS
Paperback
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 978-0593802250
Pages: 432