Wired.com presents The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

And here are your hosts.

John Joseph Adams and David Barr-Kirtley.

Hi, this is Dave. And this is John.

And welcome to episode 79 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is Karen Russell.

Her first novel, Swamp Landia, about a family of Algator wrestlers was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and has been optioned by HBO.

She's also the author of two collections of surreal short stories,

St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, and Vampyrus in the lemon grove.

Then stick around after the interview as guest geek Lynn M Thomas joins us for a panel discussion

on the weirdest stories ever. All right, so let's get to our interview.

All right, so we're here with Karen Russell.

Welcome to the show.

Hi, thanks so much for having me.

Okay, so first of all, you know, your first novel Swamp Landia was optioned by HBO.

So just what's the current status of that project?

Um, in development, still in development, so, and I'm not even sure if that's the industry

lingo. I think that they have a writer who is working on it. The

writer is not me. I'm a consultant and what those duties are are kind of fuzzy to me. So I think we'll just

have to see. I'm trying to be guardedly optimistic. I think a lot has to go right for something that gets the option to actually make it on screen

So I'm not promising you know my out-of-work friends jobs on the set holding the boom or whatever just yet but so what sort of

changes do you expect them to make to the story you know one of the big ones I

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