Reading List

Authors Like Karen Russell

In Swamplandia! (2011), thirteen-year-old Ava Bigtree’s family wrestle alligators, every one of them named Seth, at a shabby theme park in the Ten Thousand Islands off Florida’s south-west coast, until her mother dies of cancer and a rival park called the World of Darkness opens on the mainland. Karen Russell, born in Miami in 1981, grew the novel from a short story; in 2012 it was one of three Pulitzer finalists in a year when no fiction prize was given. Fourteen years later The Antidote (2025) moved her to Uz, Nebraska, where a Prairie Witch takes in the memories her neighbours cannot bear, until the Black Sunday dust storm of 14 April 1935 leaves her empty. It was shortlisted for the National Book Award. The ten writers below share her method: an impossible premise stated plainly, with grief, work and money underneath it.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Fabulism · Florida and the Dust Bowl · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Karen Russell, start with Kelly Link, another Miami-born writer of strange stories and a fellow MacArthur Fellow, and George Saunders, whose comic stories also turn to grief. For Swamplandia!’s Gulf Coast family, read Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, published the same year. Below are seven more, from a Colombian family saga of 1967 to the Dust Bowl novel that stands behind The Antidote.

10 authors like Karen Russell

01
The marvellous, told calmly

Gabriel García Márquez

Colombian · One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Love in the Time of Cholera (1985)

García Márquez (1927–2014) was born in Aracataca, Colombia, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. His grandmother’s storytelling, which treated the extraordinary as perfectly natural, shaped One Hundred Years of Solitude, the history of the Buendía family and their town, Macondo. Netflix adapted the novel as a series in 2024.

García Márquez is the older source of Russell’s tone: ghosts and miracles reported in the same voice as the weather, inside a family history. Suits readers who loved the Bigtrees and want a whole dynasty.

— Lisanne
02
Fairy tales with teeth

Angela Carter

English · The Bloody Chamber (1979), Nights at the Circus (1984), Wise Children (1991)

Carter (1940–1992) was born in Eastbourne and lived in Tokyo for about two years from 1969. The Bloody Chamber rewrites traditional fairy tales; Nights at the Circus won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and in 2012 was named the best winner in the prize’s history. In 2008 The Times ranked her tenth among the greatest British writers since 1945.

Carter, like Russell, takes the wolf girl, the circus and the folk tale and makes them about appetite, money and growing up female. Suits readers of the title story of St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves.

— Lisanne

Every book by Angela Carter →

03
The award Russell won

Shirley Jackson

American · The Haunting of Hill House (1959), We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)

Jackson (1916–1965) made her name with “The Lottery”, published in The New Yorker in 1948, and died aged 48. The Shirley Jackson Awards, first given in 2007 for psychological suspense, horror and the dark fantastic, are named after her; Russell won one in 2012 for her novelette “Reeling for the Empire”.

Jackson keeps the supernatural uncertain and the family at the centre, as Russell does with the Bird Man who promises to lead Ava to the underworld. Suits readers who want the darker edge of Russell’s stories.

— Lisanne
04
The Dust Bowl, first time round

John Steinbeck

American · Of Mice and Men (1937), The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

The Grapes of Wrath follows the Joads, Oklahoma tenant farmers driven off their land by drought, dust and bank foreclosures, west along Route 66 to California. It won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and some readers banned and burned it. Steinbeck (1902–1968) won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, and the committee cited the novel as a major reason.

The Antidote returns to Steinbeck’s ground of dust, debt and farm families, then adds a witch and a camera that photographs the future. Read him for the realist version of the decade Russell writes about.

— Lisanne

Every book by John Steinbeck →

05
Comedy that turns to grief

George Saunders

American · Tenth of December (2013), Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), Liberation Day (2022)

Saunders was born in Amarillo, Texas, in 1958, worked with an oil exploration crew in Sumatra in the early 1980s and later as a technical writer and geophysical engineer, and has taught in the Syracuse University MFA programme since 1997. Lincoln in the Bardo, his first novel, won the Booker Prize in 2017. In 2025 the National Book Foundation gave him its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

Saunders and Russell both write about workers in run-down attractions and invented industries, with jokes that give way to grief. Suits readers of Vampires in the Lemon Grove and Orange World.

— Lisanne

Every book by George Saunders →

06
Miami-born, just as strange

Kelly Link

American · Magic for Beginners (2005), The Book of Love (2024)

Link was born in Miami in 1969 and, with her husband Gavin Grant, runs Small Beer Press in Northampton, Massachusetts. Her stories have won a Hugo, three Nebula and three World Fantasy awards; the collection Get in Trouble was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2016, and she received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2018. The Book of Love is her first novel.

Link and Russell share a city of birth, a MacArthur Fellowship and a habit of putting teenagers in ordinary places that turn out to be haunted. Suits readers who prefer Russell’s stories to her novels.

— Lisanne
07
Florida without the postcard

Lauren Groff

American · Fates and Furies (2015), Florida (2018), The Vaster Wilds (2023)

Groff was born in Cooperstown, New York, in 1978 and lives in Gainesville, Florida, where she and her husband opened the bookshop The Lynx in 2024. Florida, her story collection, won The Story Prize and was a National Book Award finalist in 2018; Fates and Furies and Matrix (2021) were also National Book Award finalists. A new collection, Brawler, appeared in 2026.

Groff writes the Florida of storms and heat that Russell grew up in, as realism with dread at the edges. Suits readers who want Swamplandia!’s landscape seen by adults.

— Lisanne
08
Same year, same coast

Jesmyn Ward

American · Salvage the Bones (2011), Men We Reaped (2013), Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017)

Ward was born in Berkeley, California, in 1977 and has won the National Book Award for Fiction twice, for Salvage the Bones in 2011 and Sing, Unburied, Sing in 2017, the year she received a MacArthur Fellowship. Salvage the Bones follows a pregnant teenager, Esch Batiste, her three brothers and their father through the ten days before Hurricane Katrina, the storm and the day after, in the fictional Mississippi town of Bois Sauvage.

Ward complicates Russell. Both published novels in 2011 about a teenage girl in a Gulf Coast family without a mother, but Ward writes the poverty and the storm without the escape hatch of the marvellous. Read the two side by side.

— Lisanne

Every book by Jesmyn Ward →

09
Memory taken away

Yōko Ogawa

Japanese · The Memory Police (1994; English 2019), The Housekeeper and the Professor (2003; English 2008)

Ogawa was born in Okayama in 1962 and won the Akutagawa Prize for “Pregnancy Diary”. In The Memory Police, objects disappear from an island one by one, and with them people’s memory of them. Stephen Snyder’s translation was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2020 and won an American Book Award.

The Antidote is about a woman who holds a town’s memories and then loses them; Ogawa imagines the same loss as state policy. Suits readers who want Russell’s premise in a quieter key.

— Lisanne

Every book by Yōko Ogawa →

10
Argentine horror

Mariana Enríquez

Argentine · Things We Lost in the Fire (2016; English 2017), Our Share of Night (2019; English 2023)

Enríquez was born in Buenos Aires in 1973 and works as a journalist at Página/12. Our Share of Night won the Premio Herralde in 2019, and A Sunny Place for Shady People won the World Fantasy Award for best collection in 2025.

Enríquez, like Russell, uses ghosts and curses to write about girls, families and a country’s real history. Suits readers who want the stories with more horror and more politics.

— Lisanne

Where to start if you loved Karen Russell

If you loved the Bigtrees, read Gabriel García Márquez.

One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967): a family, a town and a century of marvels, told straight.

If you loved the stories, read Kelly Link.

Magic for Beginners (2005): her second collection, published by her own Small Beer Press.

If you loved The Antidote, read John Steinbeck.

The Grapes of Wrath (1939): the Dust Bowl and the road west, without the magic.

If you want the same coast without the marvellous, read Jesmyn Ward.

Salvage the Bones (2011): a Mississippi family in the days before Hurricane Katrina.

If you want more Karen Russell, go back to the start.

Read St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (2006), then Swamplandia! (2011), Vampires in the Lemon Grove (2013), Orange World and Other Stories (2019) and The Antidote (2025).

Frequently asked questions about authors like Karen Russell

Who writes like Karen Russell?

Kelly Link and George Saunders for strange, funny stories; Angela Carter and Gabriel García Márquez for the older roots; Jesmyn Ward and Lauren Groff for the Gulf Coast and Florida.

Which Karen Russell book should I read first?

Swamplandia! (2011) if you want a novel, or St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (2006) for her stories.

Does Karen Russell have a new book?

Her most recent novel is The Antidote (2025), set in Uz, Nebraska, around the Black Sunday dust storm of 1935. It was shortlisted for the National Book Award and was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.

What should I read after Swamplandia!?

Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, also from 2011, or Lauren Groff’s Florida stories, Florida (2018).

Is Karen Russell like George Saunders?

Both are American story writers who mix comedy and grief in invented workplaces and attractions. Saunders’s first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, won the Booker Prize in 2017.

Did Swamplandia! win the Pulitzer Prize?

No. It was one of three finalists in 2012, when no fiction prize was awarded.

Sources

List last reviewed 31 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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