St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves: Stories

· Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Various
5.0
1 review
Audiobook
7 hr 59 min
Unabridged
Eligible
Want a free 10 min sample? Listen anytime, even offline. 
Add

About this audiobook

A dazzling debut, a blazingly original voice: the ten stories in St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves introduce a radiant new talent.

In the collection’s title story, a pack of girls raised by wolves are painstakingly reeducated by nuns. In “Haunting Olivia,” two young boys make midnight trips to a boat graveyard in search of their dead sister, who set sail in the exoskeleton of a giant crab. In “Z.Z.’s Sleepaway Camp for Disordered Dreamers,” a boy whose dreams foretell implacable tragedies is sent to a summer camp for troubled sleepers (Cabin 1, Narcoleptics; Cabin 2, Sleep Apneics; Cabin 3, Somnambulists . . . ). And “Ava Wrestles the Alligator” introduces the remarkable Bigtree Wrestling Dynasty—Grandpa Sawtooth, Chief Bigtree, and twelve-year-old Ava—proprietors of Swamplandia!, the island’s #1 Gator Theme Park and Café. Ava is still mourning her mother when her father disappears, his final words to her the swamp maxim “Feed the gators, don’t talk to strangers.” Left to look after seventy incubating alligators and an older sister who may or may not be having sex with a succubus, Ava meets the Bird Man, and learns that when you’re a kid it’s often hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.

Russell’s stories are beautifully written and exuberantly imagined, but it is the emotional precision behind their wondrous surfaces that makes them unforgettable. Magically, from the spiritual wilderness and ghostly swamps of the Florida Everglades, against a backdrop of ancient lizards and disconcertingly lush plant life—in an idiom that is as arrestingly lovely as it is surreal—Karen Russell shows us who we are and how we live.


List of Readers
Ava Wrestles the Alligator--Arielle Sitrick
Haunting Olivia--Zach McLarty
Z.Z.’s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers--Patrick Mackie
The Star-Gazer’s Log of Summer-Time Crime--Nick Chamian
from Children’s Reminiscences of the Westward Migration--Jesse Bernstein
Lady Yeti and the Palace of Artificial Snows--J.B. Adkins
The City of Shells--Kathe Mazur
Out To Sea--Arthur Morey
Accident Brief, Occurrence # 00/422--Kirby Heyborne
St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves--Deirdre Lovejoy

Ratings and reviews

5.0
1 review

About the author

Karen Russell, a native of Miami, has been featured in both The New Yorker’s debut fiction issue and New York magazine’s list of twenty-five people to watch under the age of twenty-six. She is a graduate of the Columbia MFA program and is the 2005 recipient of the Transatlantic Review/Henfield Foundation Award; her fiction has recently appeared in Conjunctions, Granta, Zoetrope, Oxford American, and The New Yorker. Twenty-five years old, she lives in New York City.

Rate this audiobook

Tell us what you think.

Listening information

Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can read books purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.