A character who's run away from 19th-century fiction

I'd pretty much dismissed Karen Russell, for no good reason, as a writer elevated by smart marketing and a superclever novel title (St. Mary's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, or something like that), but I read her story in the current New Yorker, The Dredgeman's Revelation, and realized there's a lot more to her - of the batch of the vaunted 20 under 40 she has so far been the most surprising (everyone knew that Foer and some of the others are good) and most promising. Her story assuredly takes on a character, setting, and era not often written about and rarely today by any young writer - the Florida swamps, in the 30s Depression, a teenager running from an abusive stepparent (seeming to run away from the entire corpus of 19th-century fiction, that is) and finding solace in the miserable work on a barge dredging through a Florida swamp to create a canal (was there really such a thing?), he's the youngest on the crew, quiet but liked by all - a Billy Budd, actually, and we keep waiting for the worst to happen. It does, but not to him - to a pal scalded to death in a boiler explosion. Russel's writing is very assured, the setting and character beautifully evoked - again I'm going to quibble in that this is once again not a story but an excerpt (first chapter?) from a forthcoming novel. Are no young writers working on stories any more (Foer an exception here)? Maybe that makes sense, as stories tend to burn up too much autobiographical material - but magazines are the only home for good stories these days and editors owe it to the readership to find them.