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Read With Us Selection
Summer 2025

The Antidote
by Karen Russell

General Information About the Book

432 pages (hardback)

Published (US) March 2025, Knopf

Genres: contemporary literary fiction, historical fiction, magical realism, fantasy,

Setting: Nebraska

Recognition: National Book Award for Fiction 2025 FINALIST

Available in hardback ($17.34 Amazon), Kindle ($14.99), and audio (Audible 1 credit). The book and audiobook are generally available through local libraries and Libby, although availability and wait times vary.

“A tempest of a tale … This story is dazzlingly original and ambitious … Pumped full of just enough magic to make it rise without bursting the bubble of our credulity … The scale here is large … Across the vast canvas of this novel, Russell aims for nothing less than a consideration of the role that intentional amnesia plays in American history and American life. To embark on the adventure of reading The Antidote is to place yourself under the enchanting and challenging care of a writer who is guilty of actual witchcraft.”

— Ron Charles, Washington Post

Join Us For the Book Discussion on Zoom

Tuesday, January 6, 2026, 7:00 pm Eastern time
Questions will also be posted on our blogs: Highly Reasonable, Carole Knits, Dancing At the Edge.

Please RSVP to receive Zoom link information by emailing Kym (email in sidebar) by September 15, 2025. Thank you.

“It’s rarely the truth itself that people can’t accept. It’s how they feel about it.” — from The Antidote by Karen Russell

Brief Synopsis

From Goodreads

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.

Information About the Author

Bio information from Karen Russell’s website

Karen Russell is the author of six books of fiction, including the NYT bestsellers Vampires in the Lemon Grove and Swamplandia!, one of the NYT’s ten best books of the year and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is the grateful recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the NYPL’s Young Lions Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, the National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35” award, and was selected for Granta’s Best Young American Novelists and The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” list (She is now decisively over 40). She’s the recipient of two National Magazine Awards for Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, the 2023 Bottari Lattes Grinzane prize, and the 2024 Mary McCarthy Award, among other honors. 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 State’s MFA program. She serves on the board of Street Books. Born and raised in Miami, FL, she lives in Portland, OR with her husband, son, and daughter.

Book Reviews and Author Interviews

Lit Hub has a written conversation with Karen Russell that explores the novel.

For a video conversation, check out The Antidote: Karen Russell in Conversation with Brian Gresko. Karen reads a bit of The Antidote. Together they talk about many pieces of history and her research including the Land Lost Acknowledgment, global soil erosion, and open secrets of the history of colonization.

They also discuss very weighty issues raised in the novel from a discussion of substitutes for memory to inspiration from the Book of Job alongside allusions to the Wizard of Oz, and blankness as a palliative for everything. Russell says,“The myths that can cover over or invert the aggression and violence that go into the so-called settling of the west.” They talk about specific elements of the novel like the scarecrow, the cat, and play in Russell’s process.

Supplemental Resources

Character Listing

Antonina Teresa Rossi, the Antidote— a woman who works as a prairie witch or Vault and stores people’s memories
Asphodel Oletsky (Dell)— basketball-playing teenager who has been orphaned and taken in by her uncle
Harp Oletsky— Nebraskan farmer and Dell’s uncle
Cleo Allfrey— Resettlement Administration (RA) photographer
Valeria, Pazi, Nell, Thelma, Dagmara, Ellda— Dell’s Poultry & Eggs basketball teammates
Coach— basketball team’s coach
The Scarecrow— scarecrow in Harp’s field
Clemson Louis Dew— 17-year old vagrant who is set up and convicted as the Lucky Rabbit’s Foot Killer
Kettle— the Antidote’s teacher
Cherry Le Foy— a prairie witch who also had Kettle as a teacher
Stencil, Melody, Nathalee— young women at the Milford Home with Antonina
Zintkála Nuni— historical figure, a Lakota who survived the massacre as an infant at Wounded Knee Creek
Urna Buczek— Harp’s girlfriend and longtime Uz resident and Grange member
Lada Oletsky— Dell’s mother and Harp’s sister, who has been murdered before the story begins
Vick Iscoe— Sheriff of Uz
Percy Gander— Sheriff’s deputy
Dottie Iscoe— Vick’s wife
Jed and Red Iscoe— Vick and Dottie’s sons
Gladys Iscoe— Vick and Dottie’s daughter
Roy Stryker— historical figure who was head of the Farm Security Administration’s historical section
Otto Goerentz— Harp’s closest neighbor and friend
Mink Petrusev— murdered Russian woman whose body Vick and Percy burn
Giancarlo— son of Antonina’s guardian who falls in love with Antonina
The Counselor— Vault holding Harp’s father’s memory
John Boyet, Al Krista and others— Antonina’s clients in Uz
Ernie Whitson— Vick’s opponent in election for sheriff
Tomasz Oletsky— Harp’s father

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Additional Information

Karen Russell provides outstanding resources at the end of the novel, so I recommend you check those out. I’ll be adding more resources to this page, so refer to it if you’d like additional information.

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