The Antidote

FromPulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestsellingauthor ofSwamplandia!andVampires in the Lemon GroveKaren Russell: a gripping dust bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town

The Antidoteopens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsingnot just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust bowl drought but beneath its own violent histories.The Antidotefollows 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 witchs apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the towns secrets and its fate.

Russell’s novel is above all a reckoning with a nations forgettingenacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities.The Antidoteechoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have beenand what still could be.

Karen Russell is the author of six works of fiction, including theNew York TimesbestsellersSwamplandia!andVampires in the Lemon Grove. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has receivedtwo National Magazine Awards for Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, the 2023 Bottari Lattes Grinzane prize, the 2024 Mary McCarthy Award, and was selected for the National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35” prize andThe New Yorker‘s “20 under 40” list (She is now decisively over 40). She has taught literature and creative writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the University of California-Irvine, Williams College, Columbia University, and Bryn Mawr College, and was the Endowed Chair of Texas States MFA program. She serves on the board of Street Books, a mobile-library for people living outdoors. Born and raised in Miami, Florida, she now lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband, son, and daughter.

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publish Date: March 11, 2025
• Pages: 432
• Language: English
• Type: Hardcover
• EAN/UPC: 9780593802250
• Dimensions: 9.5 X 6.4 X 1.5 inches | 1.6 pounds
• BISAC Categories: Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Popular Fiction