Terry Brooks gets a lot of his long-time readers from their teen years.
Therefore, it is not surprising that some of those teens grow up to become amazing writers, publishing their own books and creating their own worlds to share with us.
Karen Russell is one of them. She is the amazingly-talented author of Swamplandia!, which was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize For Fiction. Her stories have been featured in The Best American Short Stories, Conjunctions, Granta, The New Yorker, Oxford American, and Zoetrope. She was also named a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” young writer honoree for her first book of short stories, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. In short, she is a literary powerhouse of words.
But before she was any of that, she was a teen girl reading Terry Brooks. And like many of us, she endured criticism from adults for her reading choices. In this NPR/New Yorker piece embedded below, Russell uses her love of Terry Brooks’s works to highlight the prejudice fantasy readers used to endure. A great essay about loving what you are reading — and how book culture has evolved.
Take a listen below:
And if you haven’t read Swamplandia!, Terry highly recommends it. One of his favorite books!