Photo: Michael Lionstar Karen Russell Karen Russell can look at an austere, fallow landscape and see things most people miss. During a trip to the Sandhills in Nebraska, she looked beyond the endless vistas of sand dunes and prairie grass and found the germ of an idea that became “The Tornado Auction,” a short story from her collection
Orange World (Vintage).
The Sandhills have a certain flatness that reminds Russell of her native South Florida, where you feel like “a clairvoyant of the weather you can see so far,” she says, even though the ecosystems are different. But the inhabitants of that midwestern landscape, like some of the Floridians who inhabit stories based in her home state, are not quite what they appear to be.