• Complain

Karen Russell - Vampires in the Lemon Grove

Here you can read online Karen Russell - Vampires in the Lemon Grove full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2013, publisher: Knopf, genre: Prose. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Karen Russell Vampires in the Lemon Grove
  • Book:
    Vampires in the Lemon Grove
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Knopf
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2013
  • Rating:
    4 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 80
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

Vampires in the Lemon Grove: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Vampires in the Lemon Grove" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

From the author of the best seller a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize a magical new collection of stories that showcases Karen Russells gifts at their inimitable best. A dejected teenager discovers that the universe is communicating with him through talismanic objects left behind in a seagulls nest. A community of girls held captive in a silk factory slowly transmute into human silkworms, spinning delicate threads from their own bellies, and escape by seizing the means of production for their own revolutionary ends. A massage therapist discovers she has the power to heal by manipulating the tattoos on a war veterans lower torso. When a group of boys stumble upon a mutilated scarecrow bearing an uncanny resemblance to the missing classmate they used to torment, an ordinary tale of high school bullying becomes a sinister fantasy of guilt and atonement. In a familys disastrous quest for land in the American West, the monster is the human hunger for acquisition, and the victim is all we hold dear. And in the collections marvelous title story an unforgettable parable of addiction and appetite, mortal terror and mortal love two vampires in a sun-drenched lemon grove try helplessly to slake their thirst for blood. Karen Russell is one of todays most celebrated and vital writers honored in s list of the twenty best writers under the age of forty, Grantas Best of Young American Novelists, and the National Book Foundations five best writers under the age of thirty-five. Her wondrous new work displays a young writer of superlative originality and invention coming into the full range and scale of her powers.

Karen Russell: author's other books


Who wrote Vampires in the Lemon Grove? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Vampires in the Lemon Grove — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Vampires in the Lemon Grove" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Karen Russell

Vampires in the Lemon Grove

For J.T.

Vampires in the Lemon Grove

Vampires in the Lemon Grove - image 1

In October, the men and women of Sorrento harvest the primofiore, or first flowering fruit, the most succulent lemons; in March, the yellow bianchetti ripen, followed in June by the green verdelli. In every season you can find me sitting at my bench, watching them fall. Only one or two lemons tumble from the branches each hour, but Ive been sitting here so long their falls seem contiguous, close as raindrops. My wife has no patience for this sort of meditation. Jesus Christ, Clyde, she says. You need a hobby.

Most people mistake me for a small, kindly Italian grandfather, a nonno. I have an old nonnos coloring, the dark walnut stain peculiar to southern Italians, a tan that wont fade until I die (which I never will). I wear a neat periwinkle shirt, a canvas sunhat, black suspenders that sag at my chest. My loafers are battered but always polished. The few visitors to the lemon grove who notice me smile blankly into my raisin face and catch the whiff of some sort of tragedy; they whisper that I am a widower, or an old man who has survived his children. They never guess that I am a vampire.

Santa Francescas Lemon Grove, where I spend my days and nights, was part of a Jesuit convent in the 1800s. Today its privately owned by the Alberti family, the prices are excessive, and the locals know to buy their lemons elsewhere. In summers a teenage girl named Fila mans a wooden stall at the back of the grove. Shes painfully thin, with heavy black bangs. I can tell by the careful way she saves the best lemons for me, slyly kicking them under my bench, that she knows I am a monster. Sometimes shell smile vacantly in my direction, but she never gives me any trouble. And because of her benevolent indifference to me, I feel a swell of love for the girl.

Fila makes the lemonade and monitors the hot dog machine, watching the meat rotate on wire spigots. Im fascinated by this machine. The Italian name for it translates as carousel of beef. Who would have guessed at such a device two hundred years ago? Back then we were all preoccupied with visions of apocalypse; Santa Francesca, the foundress of this very grove, gouged out her eyes while dictating premonitions of fire. What a shame, I often think, that she foresaw only the end times, never hot dogs.

A sign posted just outside the grove reads:

CIGERETTE PIE

HEAT DOGS

GRANITE DRINKS

Santa Francescas Limonata

THE MOST REFRISHING DRANK ON THE PLENET!!

Every day, tourists from Wales and Germany and America are ferried over from cruise ships to the base of these cliffs. They ride the funicular up here to visit the grove, to eat heat dogs with speckly brown mustard and sip lemon ices. They snap photographs of the Alberti brothers, Benny and Luciano, teenage twins who cling to the trees wooden supports and make a grudging show of harvesting lemons, who spear each other with trowels and refer to the tourist women as vaginas in Italian slang. Buona sera, vaginas! they cry from the trees. I think the tourists are getting stupider. None of them speak Italian anymore, and these new women seem deaf to aggression. Often I fantasize about flashing my fangs at the brothers, just to keep them in line.

As I said, the tourists usually ignore me; perhaps its the dominoes. A few years back, I bought a battered red set from Benny, a prop piece, and this makes me invisible, sufficiently banal to be hidden in plain sight. I have no real interest in the game; I mostly stack the pieces into little houses and corrals.

At sunset, the tourists all around begin to shout. Look! Up there! Its time for the path of I Pipistrelli Impazzitithe descent of the bats.

They flow from cliffs that glow like pale chalk, expelled from caves in the seeming billions. Their drop is steep and vertical, a black hail. Sometimes a change in weather sucks a bat beyond the lemon trees and into the turquoise sea. Its three hundred feet to the lemon grove, six hundred feet to the churning foam of the Tyrrhenian. At the precipice, they soar upward and crash around the green tops of the trees.

Oh! the tourists shriek, delighted, ducking their heads.

Up close, the bats spread wings are alien membranes fragile, like something internal flipped out. The waning sun washes their bodies a dusky red. They have wrinkled black faces, these bats, tiny, like gargoyles or angry grandfathers. They have teeth like mine.

Tonight, one of the tourists, a Texan lady with a big strawberry red updo, has successfully captured a bat in her hair, simultaneously crying real tears and howling: TAKE THE GODDAMN PICTURE, Sarah!

I stare ahead at a fixed point above the trees and light a cigarette. My bent spine goes rigid. Mortal terror always trips some old wire that leaves me sad and irritable. It will be whole minutes now before everybody stops screaming.

THE MOON IS a muted shade of orange. Twin disks of light burn in the sky and the sea. I scan the darker indents in the skyline, the cloudless spots that I know to be caves. I check my watch again. Its eight oclock, and all the bats have disappeared into the interior branches. Where is Magreb? My fangs are throbbing, but I wont start without her.

I once pictured time as a black magnifying glass and myself as a microscopic flightless insect trapped in that circle of night. But then Magreb came along, and eternity ceased to frighten me. Suddenly each moment followed its antecedent in a neat chain, moments we filled with each other.

I watch a single bat falling from the cliffs, dropping like a stone: headfirst, motionless, dizzying to witness.

Pull up.

I close my eyes. I press my palms flat against the picnic table and tense the muscles of my neck.

Pull UP. I tense until my temples pulse, until little black-and-red stars flutter behind my eyelids.

You can look now.

Magreb is sitting on the bench, blinking her bright pumpkin eyes. You werent even watching. If you saw me coming down, youd know you have nothing to worry about. I try to smile at her and find I cant. My own eyes feel like ice cubes.

Its stupid to go so fast. I dont look at her. That easterly could knock you over the rocks.

Dont be ridiculous. Im an excellent flier.

Shes right. Magreb can shape-shift midair, much more smoothly than I ever could. Even back in the 1850s, when I used to transmute into a bat two, three times a night, my metamorphosis was a shy, halting process.

Look! she says, triumphant, mocking. Youre still trembling!

I look down at my hands, angry to realize its true.

Magreb roots through the tall, black blades of grass. Its late, Clyde; wheres my lemon?

I pluck a soft, round lemon from the grass, a summer moon, and hand it to her. The verdelli I have chosen is perfect, flawless. She looks at it with distaste and makes a big show of brushing off a marching ribbon of ants.

A toast! I say.

A toast, Magreb replies, with the rote enthusiasm of a Christian saying grace. We lift the lemons and swing them to our faces. We plunge our fangs, piercing the skin, and emit a long, united hiss: Aaah!

OVER THE YEARS, Magreb and I have tried everything fangs in apples, fangs in rubber balls. We have lived everywhere: Tunis, Laos, Cincinnati, Salamanca. We spent our honeymoon hopping continents, hunting liquid chimeras: mint tea in Fez, coconut slurries in Oahu, jet-black coffee in Bogot, jackals milk in Dakar, Cherry Coke floats in rural Alabama, a thousand beverages purported to have magical quenching properties. We went thirsty in every region of the globe before finding our oasis here, in the blue boot of Italy, at this dead nuns lemonade stand. Its only these lemons that give us any relief.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Vampires in the Lemon Grove»

Look at similar books to Vampires in the Lemon Grove. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «Vampires in the Lemon Grove»

Discussion, reviews of the book Vampires in the Lemon Grove and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.