Get In Trouble Stories

A new, much anticipated collection of stories from the inimitable Kelly Link. '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 humour with existential dread...Her characters, driven by yearning and obsession, not only get in trouble but seek trouble out - to spectacular effect.' Publishers Weekly 'Darkly funny, sexy, frightening, and truly weird - Link can dismantle and remake the world in a paragraph.' Karen Russell 'The most darkly playful voice in American fiction.' Michael Chabon ‘She is a sorcerer. She is our greatest living fabulist.’ Carmen Maria Machado 'Richly imagined, intellectually teasing: these are not so much small fictions as windows on to entire worlds. A brilliant, giddying read.' Sarah Waters Kelly Link is the author of the collections Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, The Wrong Grave and Pretty Monsters. 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. Link is the co-founder of Small Beer Press. She was born in Miami, Florida and now lives with her husband and daughter in Northampton, Massachusetts. 'Very much fun.' Margaret Atwood, Twitter 'Kelly Link is inimitable. Her stories 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 '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.' Peter Straub 'It resonates with depth and maturity, the sense of a writer using genre for her purposes rather than the other way around...With Get In Trouble, she has created a series of fully articulated pocket universes, animated by a three-dimensional sense of character, of life.' LA Times 'Does any writer have a better, deeper instinct for the subterranean overlap between pop culture and myth...Link remains a master of a delicate genre.'Salon ‘Link’s 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 ‘Ms. Link never fusses over the surreal twists in her stories, but they contain so much emotional truth that there’s no need to explain a thing.’ New York Times ‘It’s a challenge to describe Kelly Link’s dazzling short stories. On the one hand they are deliciously, deliriously strange...Yet they are also sad, sexy, tender, keenly aware not just of the human yearning at their centres, but of the absurdities those desires lead us into.’ Weekend Australian ‘Get in Trouble is a dazzling testimony to the malleability of [Link’s] medium and her mastery of it.’ New Zealand Listener ‘Link effectively mixes the dark fantastic with Borgesian quirkiness.’ Sydney Morning Herald ‘It’s little wonder that the short story seems to be having its moment in the sun; here it shows its ability to compress lifetimes seething with tension and crystallise moments blazing with desire and defiance, into handfuls of taut, finely wrought pages.’ Age