About the Book
Fantastic, fantastical and utterly incomparable, Kelly Link's new collection explores everything from the essence of ghosts to the nature of love. And hurricanes, astronauts, evil twins, bootleggers, Ouija boards, iguanas, The Wizard of Oz, superheroes, the pyramids . . .
With each story she weaves, Link takes readers deep into an unforgettable, brilliantly constructed universe. Strange, dark and wry, Get in Trouble reveals Kelly Link at the height of her creative powers and stretches the boundaries of what fiction can do.
About the Author :
Kelly Link is the author of the collections Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, and Pretty Monsters. She and Gavin J. Grant have co-edited a number of anthologies, including multiple volumes of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror and, for young adults, Monstrous Affections. She is the co-founder of Small Beer Press. Her short stories have been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Best American Short Stories, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. She has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Link was born in Miami, Florida. She currently lives with her husband and daughter in Northampton, Massachusetts. www.kellylink.net
Review :
* Very much fun -- MARGARET ATWOOD, Twitter * Welcome to the fabulous mind of Kelly Link ... It has taken Link ten years to produce her new story collection, Get in Trouble, and it is just as brilliant as her last The New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice) * Kelly Link is inimitable. Her tales are like nothing else, dark yet sparkling with her unique brand of fairy dust. Wonderfully strange but still familiar and real. Get in Trouble is filled with pocket universes, each tale containing so much more than its length might suggest and crackling with the unexpected. The most marvelous kind of trouble to get in -- ERIN MORGENSTERN * Link's stories are always a treat, and Get In Trouble contains some of her best writing yet. Richly imagined, intellectually teasing: these are not so much small fictions as windows on to entire worlds. A brilliant, giddying read -- SARAH WATERS * Funny, moving, tender, brave and dangerous. She is unique and should be declared a national treasure, and possibly surrounded at all times by a cordon of armed marines -- NEIL GAIMAN * Every one of the stories in this collection is like a one-of-a-kind Jack-in-the-box. We turn the crank, expecting the laughter, the surprise, the rearrangement of themes familiar to our ears from ages ago, and the turning brings us all those joys. But wait, wait until the box pops open: out comes not Jack nor the weasel but our own exposed hearts. How does Kelly Link understand our pains and longings and memories and even our futures so well, and how does she make us go back to the next Jack-in-the-box, again and again, with hope and dread and determination to know life better, to live differently? Kelly Link s a national treasure! -- YIYUN LI * In this utterly astonishing new collection, Kelly Link demonstrates a perfect and completely mature command of the entirely unexpected, ever-evolving, self-examining, deeply original and personal, emotion-riddled kind of story only Kelly Link is capable of writing. Another way to say this is: in these stories, Kelly Link is the top of her self-defined form. Another way to say it is: close your mouth and get out of the way, because here comes Kelly Link, than whom no one is better -- PETER STRAUB * Intoxicating. These stories will come alive, put on zoot suits, and wrestle you to the ground. They want you and you will be theirs -- ALICE SEBOLD * Kelly Link is the literary descendant of Jorge Luis Borges and Franz Kafka -- AUDREY NIFFENEGGER * Link's stories play in a place few writers go, a netherworld between literature and fantasy, Alice Munro and JK Rowling TIME * Wonderfully odd and original [and] very scary indeed -- SARAH WATERS * With Get in Trouble, Kelly Link continues to prove just how much of a literary tightrope walker she really is. Her prose is conveyed in details so startling and fine that each one is like a firework in the brain. You work up a sweat just waiting for the next sentence to land. This is why we read, crave, need, can't live without short stories TEA OBREHT * Franz Kafka with a better understanding of lady's footwear and bad first dates. -- KAREN RUSSELL * Brilliantly off-kilter ... she sends the world of popular culture spinning off in directions so unexpected they take your breath away or make you laugh at their familiar strangeness Psychologies * Kelly Link is one of my all-time favourite writers, and the fact that she's living and is still getting better? By God, that's a small club. She is unique. You know who else would love her? Kafka and Lewis Carroll. Like them, she knows things the rest of us don't. But she also knows things we all know: what it feels like to be in love, to want to be in love, to be alone, to want to be alone, to be disappointed in people, to try again. She makes those old heartbreaks glow with strange, new lights. -- ARTHUR PHILLIPS * This is art that re-enchants the world. Who needs tediously believable situations, O. Henry endings or even truthfulness to life? Give us magic; give us wonder. What matter most in pure storytelling are style and visionary power. If your voice is hypnotic enough, you can make readers follow you anywhere Washington Post * The most darkly playful voice in American fiction -- MICHAEL CHABON * Kelly Link is the author whose books I would take to the proverbial desert island, because her books are dream-oases. Each one of these 'short stories' feels infinitely vast once you are inside it, like the enchanted castles and bottomless wells in fairytales. Link's work is always darkly funny, sexy, frightening, and truly weird - she can dismantle and remake the world in a paragraph. Since Magic for Beginners, I've been pacing the docks, waiting for more Kelly Link. Get in Trouble offers further proof that she belongs on every reader's book shelf -- KAREN RUSSELL * A bizarre yet emotionally fulfilling trip into the unknown Financial Times * Link conjures surreal circumstances then twists them in unexpected, excessive ways ... her prose and ideas dazzle; so much so that you don't see the swift elbow to the emotional solar plexus coming until it's far, far too late Guardian * 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 -- JEFF VANDERMEER * Link's real skill is making the insane seem utterly normal Bookmunch * Absurd and magical Stylist * The scope of Link's imagination is breathtaking and you never know where she'll take you next The Times * Marvelous ... As a writer Kelly Link is possessed of many magical powers, but to me what's most notable about her new collection, Get in Trouble, is its astonishing freedom... Link knows there's nothing she's 'supposed' to do; her imaginative freedom is unmitigated by a need to counterbalance the weirdness with explanation -- MEG WOLITZER * Smashing ... sensational ... Each of these stories presents 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 O: The Oprah Magazine * When it comes to literary magic, Link is the real deal: clever, surprising, affecting, fluid and funny San Francisco Chronicle
