Kelly Link

Every new book by Link arrives trailing clouds of enchantment . . . The wonders of Hollywood special effects feel like garish imitations next to Link’s sorcery.

An eldritch Our Town that somehow manages to be both epic and intimate. Link’s language is nimble and startling and goes down so easy. You won’t realize you’re drunk on this story until it’s too late and you’re careening from the spectacularly weird to the wildly funny to an aching grief almost too familiar to bear. A dizzying dream ride you will never forget.

A heart-wrenching exploration of love and loss.

To read Link is to place oneself in the hands of an expert illusionist, entering a world where nothing is ever quite what it seems.

The Brothers Grimm meet Black Mirror meets Alice in Wonderland . . . In seven remixed fairy tales, Link delivers wit and dreamlike intrigue.

Kelly Link is the master of the modern fairy tale.

A delightful collection of short stories set in a familiar-seeming world. These stories have a dreamy quality, and like traditional fairy tales, Link’s often end with a Grimm little twist. … We are still afraid of poisoned needles, strangers who offer candy to children, and what a mirror might say when we look into it. But the things that haunt Link’s characters are more subtle; they are the kinds of things that really do keep people awake at night and leave them hungry for a comforting word.

Readers as yet unfamiliar with Link will be excited to discover her singular voice in this collection of nine short stories, her first book for young adults. … With a quirky, fairytale style evocative of Neil Gaiman, the author mingles the grotesque and the ethereal to make magic on the page.”

Still, only the marvelous contents of these books can demonstrate Link’s mastery and self-confidence as an author: She believes in her stories, no matter how off the wall they might seem, and she makes her readers believe in them, too.”

Moonshiners, astronauts, super-villains sculpted from butter, Floridians – Link’s characters span genres, time periods and dimensions. What connects them is a shared sense of imprisonment. Amid outlandish locales and sci-fi nightmares, Link explores familial ties that bind and the aching truth that like her characters, we are all trapped in our own stories….Each of these stories present the reader with the same setup: Remain in your narrative comfort zone, or venture into Link’s uncharted sea of troubles. Come on. Live a Little

Since her 2001 debut, Stranger Things Happen, no one has surpassed Link at crafting stories like miniature worlds, each one palatial on the inside, honeycombed with alternate realities and alarmingly seductive. . . . Most of us fell in love with books during childhood or early adolescence. Back then, you’d open a book and the words would give like a trap door beneath your feet, and you’d fall right through them into the author’s world. For a distracted adult reader inured to the tricks of the trade, this experience is vanishingly rare. A new Link collection is therefore more than just a good excuse for a trip to the bookstore. It’s a zerogravity vacation in a dust jacket.

Get in Trouble resonates with depth and maturity, the sense of a writer using genre for her purposes rather than the other way around. . . . The stories here are effective because we believe them — not just their situations but also their hearts. . . . [Kelly Link] has created a series of fully articulated pocket universes, animated by a three-dimensional sense of character, of life.

Beautifully written, with light and lightness balanced against darkness and hidden depth, the stories in Get In Trouble confirm once again that Kelly Link is a modern virtuoso of the form—playful and subversive required reading for anyone who loves short fiction.

I fell hard [for Get in Trouble]. . . .I’m way late to the Kelly Link party, given that everyone has been telling me for years how amazing her stories are — utterly addictive, finely wrought concoctions of fantasy and science fiction and literary realism and horror and young adult and old adult.

In stories as haunting as anything the Grimm brothers could have come up with, Link (Magic for Beginners, 2005, etc.) gooses the mundane with meaning and enchantment borrowed from myth, urban legend and genre fiction. Here are superheroes who, like minor characters from reality shows, attend conferences at the same hotels as dentists and hold auditions for sidekicks. Here, a Ouija board can tell you as much about your future as your guidance counselor. In "Two Houses," six astronauts wake from suspended animation to while away the time telling ghost stories, although they may be ghosts themselves. In "I Can See Right Through You," an actor past his prime, famous for his role as a vampire, yearns for the leading lady who has replaced him with a parade of eternally younger versions of what he once was—but who is the real demon lover? In "The New Boyfriend," a teenager discontent with her living boyfriend toys with stealing her best friend's birthday present, a limited edition Ghost Boyfriend, capable of Spectral Mode. In "Light," Lindsey has two shadows, one of which long ago grew to become her almost-real twin brother. She contemplates a vacation on a "pocket universe," a place "where the food and the air and the landscape seemed like something out of a book you'd read as a child; a brochure; a dream." Lindsey could be describing Link's own stories, creepy little wonders that open out into worlds far vaster than their shells. In a Link story, someone is always trying to escape and someone is always vanishing without a trace. Lovers are forever being stolen away like changelings, and when someone tells you he'll never leave you, you should be very afraid. Exquisite, cruelly wise and the opposite of reassuring, these stories linger like dreams and will leave readers looking over their shoulders for their own ghosts.

These nine stories may begin in familiar territory—a birthday party, a theme park, a bar, a spaceship—but they quickly draw readers into an imaginative, disturbingly ominous world of realistic fantasy and unreal reality. Like Kafka hosting Saturday Night Live, Link mixes humor with existential dread. … Each carefully crafted tale forms its own pocket universe, at once ordinary (a teenage girl adores and resents her BFF) and bizarre (...therefore she tries to steal the BFF's robot vampire boyfriend doll). Link's characters, driven by yearning and obsession, not only get in trouble but seek trouble out—to spectacular effect

Link’s stories … play in a place few writers go, a netherworld between literature and fantasy, Alice Munro and J.K. Rowling, and Link finds truths there that most authors wouldn’t dare touch.