RaveThe GuardianOrange World is Russell’s third collection of short stories and it contains all her trademark signs of weirdness ... In many of the stories there is a dark ecological anxiety not far from the surface; the world aches like a wound around characters who know only too late that they should be afraid. The natural world is burdened by intimations of climate crisis and Russell’s protagonists are burdened, too, each hunting for something that is lost to them: love or solitude, money or freedom. Often her characters are loners, trapped on the outside looking in, mulling their heavy mistakes. Where another writer might draw back, Russell forges forward ... Always Russell’s writing reaches past beauty to find the oddity, the heat beneath ... Where other writers shift towards the novel, aside from the wonderful Swamplandia! she remains steadfastly a short-story writer, and Orange World demonstrates how her attention to this tricky craft has paid off. Though her characters are living their own magic-realist, fabulist lives, it is possible to see ourselves within them, peering out.
Ian MacKenzie
PositiveThe GuardianThis is an expansive book tangling big ideas on class and race, marriage and politics. Emma narrates her life in fragments, flipping between expensive restaurants and political marches. MacKenzie has found a narrator who can voice many of the uncomfortable issues of our time: one cannot help but read on. He is exploring the privilege of the white American abroad, and Feast Days delivers cutting criticism ... For the most part, this book rings devastatingly true. Occasionally, however, there is a coldness to the language, an emotional distancing that leaves the reader unable to really care for the characters. There is also a delight in words that is wonderful to read, a delicious speed to the prose. Feast Days is not a thriller, but reads a little like one, moving swiftly from one kind of experience to the next with brutal, dazzling effect.
