Thank goodness for the postman and the day he delivered Swamplandia! to my door. Swamplandia!, written by Karen Russell, tells the story of the enigmatic Bigtree family, owners and operators of a down-at-the-heel tourist destination in the Florida Everglades....

Word Count: Three. That won't do. After all, it's National November Writing Month (NaNoWriMo): a time when every participating writer is given a goal of spewing out a 50,000 word novel in one month. That's a minimum of 1,667 words a day. But thousands...