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Staff Pick
Kelly Link is hands-down, no-questions-asked, one of my favorite working authors today. I remember when a friend gave me her collection, Magic for Beginners, my freshman year in college, like Link’s writing was a secret she only wanted to share with a select few. But I’m so lucky she shared with me, because her stories have become a constant for me. I’m obsessed with these stories: as twisted and weird and hilarious as I’ve come to expect from her, with characters that feel torn from our world and dropped into new realities where ghosts love the snow and death lingers along a white road that skirts at their peripheral vision. Mesmerizing. Recommended By Kelsey F., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Seven ingeniously reinvented fairy tales that play out with astonishing consequences in the modern world, from one of today's finest short story writers — MacArthur "Genius Grant" fellow Kelly Link, bestselling author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Get in Trouble
Featuring illustrations by award-winning artist Shaun Tan
Finding seeds of inspiration in the Brothers Grimm, seventeenth-century French lore, and Scottish ballads, Kelly Link spins classic fairy tales into utterly original stories of seekers — characters on the hunt for love, connection, revenge, or their own sense of purpose.
In "The White Cat's Divorce," an aging billionaire sends his three sons on a series of absurd goose chases to decide which child will become his heir. In "The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear," a professor with a delicate health condition becomes stranded for days in an airport hotel after a conference, desperate to get home to her wife and young daughter, and in acute danger of being late for an appointment that cannot be missed. In "Skinder's Veil," a young man agrees to take over a remote house-sitting gig for a friend. But what should be a chance to focus on his long-avoided dissertation instead becomes a wildly unexpected journey, as the house seems to be a portal for otherworldly travelers--or perhaps a door into his own mysterious psyche.
Twisting and turning in astonishing ways, expertly blending realism and the speculative, witty, empathetic, and never predictable — these stories remind us once again of why Kelly Link is incomparable in the realm of short fiction.
Review
"Reading Kelly Link is stepping onto a slide that spirals you down into the heart of the kaleidoscope, splashes you into a technicolor fairy tale, and makes you either smile wide enough that you cry, or the other way around. Her storytelling is wondrous and fanciful, full of longing and terror." — Stephen Graham Jones, author of Don't Fear the Reaper
Review
"Kelly Link is the Alice Munro of the fantastic. These are big stories, tales you dive into, live inside, and come out the other end changed. Together, they make a glorious book, full of grand journeys across different times, experiences, and realities." — Victor LaValle, author of Lone Women
Review
"Kelly Link's stories are spooky and funny, grounded and floating, and, as always, completely her own. There is no mistaking a story by Kelly Link. This book is sublime." — Emma Straub, author of This Time Tomorrow
About the Author
Kelly Link is the author of Get in Trouble, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, Magic for Beginners, Stranger Things Happen, and Pretty Monsters. Her short stories have been published in The Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. She is a MacArthur "Genius Grant" fellow and has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is the co-founder of Small Beer Press and co-edits the occasional zine Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. She is also the co-owner of Book Moon, an independent bookstore in Easthampton, Massachusetts.