We know you’re excited for new books…

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…so we’re going to keep stoking the flames!

Coming in June 2010 is Karen Lord’s fantastic and award-winning debut novel, Redemption in Indigo. We like Karen’s book because it’s choc-a-bloc full of magic–trickster spiders, metamorphic spirits, and clairvoyant nuns, oh my!  An imaginative re-telling of a Senegalese folk tale, Redemption in Indigo tells the story of Paama, whose overweight and overbearing husband causes nothing but trouble and embarrassment.  When Paama abandons her husband and returns to her home village, the magic really begins.  Unbeknownst to Paama, she wields the Chaos Stick, a handy device that controls the course of Fate, and the Indigo Lord wants it back…

As you might remember, Karen won the 2008 Frank Collymore Literary Prize in Barbados for Redemption in Indigo–then she just won it again for her novel “The Best of All Possible Worlds.”

If you aren’t impressed yet, Nalo Hopkinson called Karen’s book “The impish love child of Tutuola and Marquez. Utterly delightful.”

We think so, too.  It’s a perfect read for the summer weather (though it’s possible the Chaos Stick is wreaking havoc on our weather patterns here in Massachusetts!).

Updated to add: more coverage of the award in The Barbados Advocate and The Nation.

More news of delightful reads to come…

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Hound – Reviews

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Reviews of Hound
by Vincent McCaffrey

“If you favor a leisurely but still intriguing mystery with amiable characters and a devotion to the printed word, Hound will provide a pleasant diversion. As much about books — and love and knowledge and family — as about murder, Hound is the first in McCaffrey’s projected trilogy, and book lovers will eagerly await Henry’s next outing.”
—Richmond Times-Dispatch

“One of the strengths of this book is McCaffrey’s droll description throughout…. As quick as McCaffrey’s wit is, so is his un-saccharine sentimentality…. In the end, that careful attention is what makes Hound evoke such a Jimmy Stewart-movie atmosphere. It wraps up completely like a, yes, package—but an honest one, skillfully wrapped and artfully offered.”
—Rain Taxi

“For the true bibliophile, this is a book you’ll love. McCaffrey peppers his prose with all kinds of allusions and references to books and literature, new and old, classic and arcane, as well as multiple passages of verse. Clearly, as a career bookseller, McCaffrey knows his books.
—The Hippo, NH

“Henry Sullivan is just squeaking by as a “book hound,” a wholesale rare book dealer. He scrounges yard and estate sales picking up the odd bibliographic treasure here and there. He thinks he might be onto a second shot at happiness when an ex-girlfriend asks him to appraise a collection of first editions left by her late husband. But when this former love is murdered, Sullivan turns from reading Raymond Chandler to trying to solve the crime himself. With a faster pace tempered by real emotional resonance, Hound is different from John Dunning’s “Bookman” series, yet there is enough behind the scenes information about the rare book trade to appeal to Cliff Janeway fans. (McCaffrey ran an independent bookstore for 30 years, so he knows what he’s talking about.) The tale is packed with references not only to mystery writers like Erle Stanley Gardner, but a variety of others from Charles Dickens to Nevil Shute. McCaffrey even name checks Harlan Ellison as an example of “The good ones are all difficult.” Set in a beautifully-evoked contemporary Boston, the old town soon provides a wealth of other mysteries for Sullivan, like a hidden stash of letters belonging to a flapper adventuress of the 1920s. As with all good books about books (even novels), this one will send you out looking for the other writers discussed.”
—Author Magazine

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Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead – Reviews

by Alan DeNiro

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Reviews

“Deeply weird, sometimes challenging, but always smart and affecting.”
– Locus (Notable Books)

“Endlessly imaginative.”
– Venus

“Deniro’s greatest gifts are those of a poet, and his prose is filled with stunning images and incantatory rhythms. Debuts often come along with press releases touting them as “assured,” and sure enough, Deniro’s was no different. But with talent as deep as his, it’s no wonder Deniro is confident in touring us around his strange worlds.”
–Jonathan Messinger, Time Out Chicago

“Thoughtful, ambitious writing and truly transformative reading.”
– Small Spiral Notebook

“Maybe the future of sf is Alan DeNiro. The title story here, set in twenty-third-century Pennsylvania, is its nameless-till-the-last-sentence narrator’s university-application essay, numbered footnotes and all, which explains why not to expect him on campus anytime soon; he is in love and considering getting gills. Maybe DeNiro is the future of alternate history: in “Our Byzantium,” a college town is invaded by horse-and-chariot-led soldiers who demolish cars, wheelchairs, and other machines; reestablish Greek as the lingua franca; and otherwise conquer. He could be fantasy’s tomorrow, too, if the offhandedness of the impossible transformations in “The Cuttlefish,” “The Centaur,” “The Excavation,” and “If I Leap” catches on. In “The Fourth” and “A Keeper,” DeNiro is one of the most powerful, least partisan prophets of consumerist totalitarianism. “Salting the Map” confounds the distinction between artifice and reality as deftly and daftly as Andrew Crumey’s Pfitz (1997) and Zoran Zivkovic’s Impossible Stories (2006). The long closer, “Home of the,” about Erie, Pennsylvania, now and then, is as laconic and associative as its title is elliptic. Refreshing, imaginative, funny-scary stuff.”
– Ray Olson, Booklist

“A commitment to experimental structure and oddball elements provides this debut collection’s consistency…. The collection argues for DeNiro as a writer to watch.”
– Publishers Weekly

“Many of these stories unfold like dreams, startling in their detail but elusive in their meaning. Yet, the prosaic as well as the poetic features in these stories as characters attempt to create a detailed but incomplete record, like a dream book of their own histories. Objects such as a college entrance essay, maps, postcards, outdated computer disks, the provenance of a chess set, all become documents which convey the fragility of histories”
– Greenman Review

Advance Readers say:

“Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead is a thrill ride. Men jump from buildings and walk away, Assassins are hired to murder novels, Byzantines spring from the hills and sack college towns. On each page Alan DeNiro performs feats of acrobatic skill, holding the edge with remarkable control. He has created a brand new world, and I believe every word of it.”
– Hannah Tinti (Animal Crackers)

“I’m not ordinarily an editor, so finding stories for the first six issues of Fence magazine was a guilty pleasure, and the subsequent work by formerly unknown Fence writers like Kelly Link and Julia Slavin has made me look like a prognosticator, or maybe an annoying drunk guy on a streak at a casino. Now here’s Alan DeNiro, whose “Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead” was always my favorite. I’m thrilled to see him in bookstores at last.”
– Jonathan Lethem (Fortress of Solitude)

“Alan DeNiro’s stories move in unexpected ways into unexpected places — up in the air, under the water, out of this world. He has a gift for precise language and poetic logic, his own unique sort of circus realism. Sharp, smart, and completely original, this is a lively, lovely collection from a memorable talent.”
– Karen Joy Fowler (The Jane Austen Book Club)

“Reading Alan DeNiro’s new collection, Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead, made me feel like a dog that twists its head a bit to the side on hearing a whistle too high for humans to hear. The dog is perplexed and intrigued by the sound — it knows where it’s coming from but not really. Familiar enough, but maybe not. So too with these strong, out of kilter stories. DeNiro blows his own distinctly different sounding whistle and once you’ve heard it, you can’t help but stop and take real notice.”
– Jonathan Carroll (Glass Soup)

“The wholly original, carefully crafted tales that comprise Alan Deniro’s Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead are like colorful pinatas full of live scorpions — playful, unexpected, and deadly serious.”
– Jeffrey Ford (The Girl in the Glass)

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Generation Loss – Reviews

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Reviews + Quotes for Generation Loss

“Thirty years ago, Cassandra Neary’s grim photos of punks and corpses briefly made her the toast of the downtown art scene. Now an alcoholic wage slave, Neary accepts a magazine assignment to interview one of her reclusive photographer heroes on a Maine island, where a rash of missing-teenager cases and an off-kilter populace grab her attention. It takes time to warm to the self-destructive, sour-tempered protagonist –she drives drunk, pops Adderall and Percocet, and generally tries to not stick out her neck. Luckily, Hand’s terse but transporting prose keeps the reader turning pages until Neary’s gritty charm does, finally, shine through.” (B)
– Entertainment Weekly

“Although Generation Loss moves like a thriller, it detonates with greater resound.”
– Graham Joyce, Washington Post Book World

“This novel disturbs like Cass’s photos of dead junkies and squalid club scenes. While in some ways she’s just another self-destructive person, Cass’s intelligence and talent make her an appealing mess. Hand propels this oddly appealing character through an old-fashioned mystery-thriller with stirring results. In the end, Generation Loss is a conventional story of sin and redemption. With darkly inventive polish, Hand reveals a character so deeply disordered, she’s both unlikable and compelling.”
—Time Out Chicago

“Cass is a marvel, someone with whom we take the difficult journey toward delayed adulthood, wishing her encouragement despite grave odds.”
– Los Angeles Times

“This smart, dark, literary thriller will keep you up at night. A photographer who has been drinking, doing drugs, and alienating everyone around her since the ’70s goes to Maine to interview a legendary photographer and gets caught up in the case of a missing girl.”
– Megan Sullivan’s Pick of the Week at the Boston Globe

“This long-awaited fantasy novel brings an end to the critically acclaimed Aegypt quartet that takes ‘the vast jigsaw that Crowley has assembled in the first three books – and places them in a picture that’s open, smiling, filled with possibility….gracefully written, beautifully characterized, moving, and thought-provoking…. [Graham Sleight]‘”
– Locus Notable Books

“Just as lives that are only momentarily brilliant deserve celebration and respect, though, so do such novels, because life is dark enough that we need whatever illumination we can get, and there’s plenty to be had in Generation Loss.”
– Strange Horizons

“A formerly famous punk photographer attracted to the dead and damaged stumbles on a serial killer case when she takes a job inteviewing a famous reclusive photographer in this dark thriller of art and damaged souls, and despite only a hint of the supernatural, ‘…something of a departure for the author, but fully as elegant and significant as her overtly fantastic works. There is grave beauty her, and great thematic power.’ [Nick Gevers]”
– Valley Advocate

“Hand (Mortal Love, Black Light) expertly ratchets up the suspense until it’s at the level of a high-pitched scream near novel’s end.”
– Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

* “Hand (Mortal Love) explores the narrow boundary between artistic genius and madness in this gritty, profoundly unsettling literary thriller.”
– Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Ægypt is a metamorphosis, a metensomatosis, a memory play and a meta-novel; a story about many stories, a book with a larger book inside it. The further in you go, the bigger it gets.”
– Elizabeth Hand, F&SF

“Cass Neary, Elizabeth Hand’s unlikely heroine in her latest novel Generation Loss, may be hard to like, but I found her story is easy to love.”
– Feminist Review

“A dark, literate mystery that’s easy to appreciate and hard to put down.”
– The Olympian

“The novel crackles with energy: it is alive.”
– Nicholas Rombes, (The Ramones and New Punk Cinema)

“Intense and atmospheric, Generation Loss is an inventive brew of postpunk attitude and dark mystery. Elizabeth Hand writes with craftsmanship and passion.”
– George Pelecanos

“Lucid and beautifully rendered. Great, unforgiving wilderness, a vanished teenager, an excellent villain, and an obsession with art that shades into death: what else do you need? An excellent book.”
– Brian Evenson, The Open Curtain

Praise for Elizabeth Hand’s previous novels:

” A literary page-turner . . . deeply pleasurable. . . . A delightful waking dream.”
– People (****)

“One of the most sheerly impressive, not to mention overwhelmingly beautiful books I have read in a long time.”
—Peter Straub

*”[Hand’s] language has an incantatory beauty.”
– Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

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Interfictions – Bios

by Delia Sherman

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About the Editors

Delia Sherman considers herself a “recovering academic.” She got her PhD in Renaissance Studies and taught at Boston University and Northeastern, during which time she wrote her first novel, Through a Brazen Mirror. She left the academy in 1993 to write and edit full time, co-editing anthologies of science fiction and fantasy with Terri Windling and Ellen Kushner and serving as a consulting editor at Tor Books. Her other adult novels are The Porcelain Doveand The Fall of the Kings, written with partner Ellen Kushner. In 2006, Viking published her first novel for young readers, Changeling. Her short fiction has appeared most recently in The Faery Reel, Salon Fantastique, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Coyote Road, and The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror. She satisfies her continuing desire to teach by serving as an instructor at various writing workshops in the U.S. and Europe, including Odyssey, Wiscon, and Clarion. A founding member of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, she lives in New York City.

Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between realism and the fantastic are often ambiguous. She is completing a PhD in English literature at Boston University, where she teaches classes on fantasy and the gothic. Her short story collection, In the Forest of Forgetting, was published in 2006 by Prime Books. She lives in Boston with her husband Kendrick and daughter Ophelia.

About the Contributors

Karen Jordan Allen spent her mostly happy childhood in rural Indiana. She now lives in Maine with her husband and daughter, a cat, and a rabbit. Her fiction has appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies, including Century, A Nightmare’s Dozen, Bruce Coville’s Strange Worlds, Black Gate, First Heroes: New Tales of the Bronze Age, and Asimov’s Science Fiction.

Christopher Barzak spent two years in Japan, teaching English in a suburb of Tokyo, and returned home to Youngstown, Ohio last year. His first novel, One for Sorrow, was published by Bantam Books in August 2007.

K. Tempest Bradford is an Ohio native and alumna of the Clarion West and Online Writing Workshops. She currently lives in New York City (at the very tip-top with the ravens). She spends most of her time trying to find a place with free tea and Internet where she can write.

Matthew Cheney’s work has appeared in One Story, Locus, Web Conjunctions, Rain Taxi, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. His weblog, The Mumpsimus, was nominated for a World Fantasy Award in 2005, and he is the series editor for the annual Best American Fantasyanthology from Prime Books.

Michael J. DeLuca would like to tell you he lives in a cave in Western MA, pronouncing false prophecy in exchange for such essential sustenance as food, water and wireless internet. Unfortunately such caves are few and far between, and often occupied by fearsome squatters, so he advises that you not go looking for him and visit his website instead.

Adrián Ferrero was born in La Plata (República Argentina) and attended the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, where he is currently doing his PhD. He has published academic articles in compiled editions and journals in his country, the U.S.A., France, Germany, and Spain. Fiction publications include Verse, a collection of short stories, and Cantares, a book of poetry. He is also co-editor of the digital magazine on creative writing Diagonautas.

Colin Greenland is English: born in Dover, educated at Oxford, with homes in Cambridge and the Peak District. His books include Finding Helen and the space opera trilogy that began with the multi-award winning Take Back Plenty. He lives with Susanna Clarke, author of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.

Csilla Kleinheincz is a Hungarian-Vietnamese fantasy writer living in Erkel, Hungary. Besides translating classics of fantasy, such as Peter S. Beagle’s works, she works as an editor at Delta Vision, a major Hungarian fantasy publisher. Her first novel, published in 2005, and most of her short stories are part of Hungarian slipstream literature.

Joy Marchand lives in a lopsided, historic rowhouse in Salem, Massachusetts. In the last two years she’s shifted her focus from short stories to longer works, and she’s currently writing a series of linked urban legends for her interstitial novel-within-a-novel set in the Chihuahuan Desert of West Texas. .

Holly Phillips is the author of the award-winning story collection In the Palace of Repose. She lives in the mountains of western Canada.

Rachel Pollack is the author of 30 books of fiction and non-fiction, including the award-winning novels Unquenchable Fire and Godmother Night. She is also a poet and a visual artist, creator of the Shining Tribe Tarot deck. She lives online and offline in New York’s Hudson Valley.

Veronica Schanoes is a writer and a scholar with a particular interest in fairy tales and genre theory. Her work has appeared in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Trunk Stories, Endicott Studio, and Jabberwocky.

Léa Silhol was born in Africa and grew up in Europe, but considers herself a “citizen of the world.” She is considered one of the leading writers in fantasy in the French language, with four short stories collections and a novel, La Sève et le Givre, which won the Fantasy Merlin Award in 2003.

Jon Singer grew up in Brooklyn, NY, wanting to be a scientist. That didn’t work out, but he is now semi-officially a Mad Scientist, which may even be better. You can find some of his work here.

Vandana Singh is an Indian speculative fiction writer born and raised in New Delhi. She lives in the Boston area, where she also teaches college physics and has published a children’s book:Younguncle Comes to Town (Viking 2006).

Anna Tambour currently lives in the Australian bush with a large family of other species, including one man. Her collection, Monterra’s Deliciosa & Other Tales &, and her novel,Spotted Lily, are Locus Recommended Reading List selections. Her website is Anna Tambour and Others and she blogs at medlarcomfits.blogspot.com.

Mikal Trimm has sold works of speculative fiction and poetry to a number of venues in the past few years. Recent or upcoming stories may be found in Weird Tales, Black Gate, Postscripts, Polyphony 6, and Shadowed Realms. He maintains a web presence (for no apparent reason) here.

Catherynne M. Valente is the author of the Orphan’s Tales series, as well as The Labyrinth,Yume no Hon: The Book of Dreams, The Grass-Cutting Sword, and four books of poetry, Music of a Proto-Suicide, Apocrypha, The Descent of Inanna, and Oracles. She has been nominated for the Rhysling and Spectrum Awards as well as the Pushcart Prize. She was born in the Pacific Northwest and currently lives in Ohio with her two dogs.

Leslie What is a Nebula Award-winning author who writes short stories, essays, and novels. Visit Whatworld.

• Interview with the editors
• Interfictions blog
• Interstitial Arts Foundation

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Kelly Link Bio

by Kelly Link

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a short biography of Ms. Kelly Link

Kelly Link’s debut collection, Stranger Things Happen, was a Firecracker nominee, a Village Voice Favorite Book and a Salon Book of the Year — Salon called the collection “…an alchemical mixture of Borges, Raymond Chandler, and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Stories from the collection have won the Nebula, the James Tiptree Jr., and the World Fantasy Awards.

Her second collection, Magic for Beginners, was a Book Sense pick (and a Best of Book Sense pick); and selected for best of the year lists byTime Magazine, Salon, Boldtype, Village Voice, San Francisco Chronicle, and The Capitol Times. It was published in paperback by Harcourt.

Kelly is an editor for the Online Writing Workshop and has been a reader and judge for various literary awards. With Gavin J. Grant and Ellen Datlow she edits The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror (St. Martin’s Press). She also edited the anthology, Trampoline.

Kelly has visited a number of schools and workshops including Stonecoast in Maine, Washington University, Yale, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, Brookdale Community College, Brookdale, NJ, Lenoir-Rhyne College, Hickory, NC, the Imagination Workshop at Cleveland State University, New England Institute of Art & Communications, Brookline, MA, Clarion East at Michigan State University, Clarion West in Seattle, WA, and Clarion South in Brisbane, Australia.

Kelly lives in Northampton, MA. She received her BA from Columbia University and her MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Kelly and her husband, Gavin J. Grant, publish a twice-yearly zine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet — as well as books — as Small Beer Press.

Low resolution (for web use only) author photos. Links below are for high-resolution print-ready versions.(T-shirt — always — Gama-Go.)

Credit: Courtesy of the author.

Click here for hi-res download

Click here for hi-res download

Click here for hi-res download

Kelly Link is represented by:

Renee Zuckerbrot
Renee Zuckerbrot Literary Agency
115 West 29th Street, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10001
(212) 967-0072
(212) 967-0073
renee@rzagency.com

Foreign Rights:

Jenny Meyer
Jenny Meyer Literary Agency, Inc.
115 West 29th St., 10th Flr
NY, NY 10001
(212) 564-9898

Asia:
Whitney Lee
The Fielding Agency, LLC.
269 South Beverly Drive, #341
Beverly Hills, CA 90212
310.276.7517

Film rights:

Sarah Self
The Gersh Agency
41 Madison Avenue, 33rd Floor
New York, NY 10010

Kelly and friend pose at a Japanese subway stop (1998)

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Other Cities – Bradley Denton quote (pt. 4)

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Other Cities, a Chapbook
Benjamin Rosenbaum

Quoting Mr. Denton:

Dear Ben,

Which was just a quick way of saying:

The eloquence and poignancy of each of these stories astonished me. “The City of Peace,” alone, is enough to make one weep. But when read as a whole, Other Cities is not only harrowing, but exhilarating. It’s a fearless exploration into both the heart of darkness and the soul of hope. Here, despair and joy are neither opposites nor antagonists — but husband and wife, brother and sister, yin and yang. In these Cities of Humanity, you won’t meet one without meeting the other.

– Bradley Denton

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Other Cities – Bradley Denton quote (pt. 3)

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Other Cities, a Chapbook
Benjamin Rosenbaum

Quoting Mr. Denton:

Dear Ben,

Unfortunately, I’m an atheist, so someone might accuse me of dishonest deity interjection (thus casting a cloud of doubt over the entire sentence). Another problem is that “My God, these are beautiful” is quite short . . . and a proper blurb, particularly for stories as fine as those in Other Cities, should be long enough to be quoted with ellipses . . . like so . . . thus suggesting that the blurber had so many good things to say that they wouldn’t all fit . . . and that some of the best ones had to be left out.

On the other hand, “My God, these are beautiful,” although blasphemous and short, is true and concise. It’s also an improvement over my first draft:

“Holy shit!”

– Bradley Denton

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Order here or send a check or a money order using this form.

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Limited Editions

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Magic for Beginners is the highly anticipated second collection by Kelly Link, the author of the cult favorite collection Stranger Things Happen. As the title suggests, this is an engaging, funny, and magical selection of stories about haunted convenience stores, husbands and wives, rabbits, zombies, weekly apocalyptic poker parties, witches, superheroes, marriages, and cannons, and includes several stories original to the collection. Stories from Magic for Beginners have previously been published in McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, Conjunctions, and The Dark.

Hand-numbered and signed by the author and illustrator and includes two tipped-in plates: an enlargement of the title story illustration and a color reproduction of the trade dustjacket painting by Shelley Jackson which is based on “Lady with an Ermine” by Leonardo da Vinci held in The Czartoryskich Museum in Krakow. Printed by Thomson-Shore of Dexter, MI, on 70# Finch Opaque Cream White Smooth paper, with 80# Oatmeal Rainbow Endpapers, Smyth Sewn in Cobalt Blue Pearl Linen Cloth, with a ribbon to keep your place.

Accompanied by a deck of poker cards backed with the cover illustration and illustrated with Shelley Jackson’s interior illustrations.

Maureen F. McHugh is the author of four acclaimed novels. Her genre-expanding short fiction has won the Hugo and Locus Awards and has frequently been included in Best of the Year anthologies. Since 1988 she has attracted a broad readership in publications such as Asimov’s, Scifiction, Starlight, The Year’s Best Science Fiction, and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Now, in her long-awaited first collection, McHugh’s subtle talents illuminate the relationship between parents and children from angles that everyone — mother or father, daughter or son — can relate to. These are beautiful stories about the ways in which social and technological shifts impact family dynamics.

Signed and hand-numbered by the author includes five poems not in the trade edition. This edition also includes a tipped-in print of Judith Anderson photographed in the role of Medea by Erwin Blumenfeld. Printed by Thomson-Shore of Dexter, Michigan, on 70# Finch Opaque Cream White Smooth paper, with 80# Red Rainbow Endpapers, Smyth Sewn in Pearl Linen Cloth. We have included a ribbon to keep your place.

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Stranger Things Happen – Reviews

by Kelly Link

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stranger things happen by Kelly Link

2001 Year’s Best Lists:
Salon The Village Voice San Francisco Chronicle
Fantastic Metropolis: Cory Doctorow, Jeffrey Ford, L.Timmel Duchamp, Luis Rodrigues
Locus Best Book of 2001 | Locus Recommended Reading List: John Clute, Gardner Dozois, Charles N. Brown, Faren Miller
Also, noted in: Publishers Weekly

reviews

“my favorite fantasy writer, Miss Kelly Link”
– Alan Cheuse, NPR, All Things Considered, June 2003

China Mieville’s list of books to read

Philadelphia City Paper, Sept. 26, 2002
New York Magazine, February 11, 2002
San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday November 18, 2001
New York Times Book Review, Sunday November 11, 2001
Washington Post
Science Fiction Weekly
Ink19
A review in Hebrew — any translations?
Strange Horizons
Tangentonline
Gadfly Online
Locus
Science Fiction Chronicle
F&SF
Montreal Mirror
one in Finnish!

Eclectica Review, 7/05
[Link's] stories go in places you never thought of, never imagined. Her talent is clear and obvious but her stories are often mysterious and even frightening…. [Stranger Things Happen] is a collection that defies genre assignment and stereotyping, that insists instead that it simply be read and enjoyed.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer
Stranger Things Happen (Small Beer Press, $16) by Kelly Link is 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.
“Shoe and Marriage” borrows more than a bit from the story of Cinderella, and “Travels With the Snow Queen” and “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose” play on fairy-tale titles and content. There is also a recurring character, the Girl Detective, who is a lot like a twentysomething Nancy Drew.
Link’s stories include lots of fairy-tale staples like ghosts, stepmothers and talking ravens. Still, her characters’ fears more often involve parents, careers, relationships and being left than things that make noises in the night.
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.
And no matter how odd the events in her stories may seem, as this book’s title says, stranger things happen.

The Miami Herald, May 25, 2002
Sinister. Dreamy. Supernatural. Link’s stories dazzle even as they unsettle. It’s hard to imagine anything stranger than a multi-legged beauty contestant, a noseless, nimble-fingered father with a collection of metal and wood prosthetics or a deceased man mailing letters to his widow from a netherworld bordered by a nappy ocean with teeth. And that’s for starters. The bizarre atmospherics within these stories are driven as much by what is left unexplained, as in The Specialist’s Hat, where two identical 10-year-olds move to a dark mausoleum of a house with their father after their mother’s death. The first sentence spotlights the Samantha twin while she speculates that ”when you’re Dead, you don’t have to brush your teeth.” The Claire twin chimes in with ”when you’re Dead, you live in a box, and it’s always dark, but you’re not ever afraid.” In this fashion, the twins’ fates are foreshadowed but never quite delineated, as their transformation, of sorts, takes place off the page. Link blends myths, ghosts and alien landscapes with a healthy ladle of modern life for stories that at first confound but eventually order themselves into a titillating weirdness.

Rain Taxi
Link’s stories defy explanation, or at least, brief summary, instead working on the plane between dream and cognitive dissonance. They are true to themselves: witty, beautiful, funny, and startling.

Asimov’s
[H]er writing belongs in the same camp as Jonathan Carroll’s: spooky, indeterminate, a kind of exemplar of literary Heisenbergism. The more you push on any one dimension of her eerie, funny tales, seeking to know the unknowables she deftly sketches, the less you know about other slippery aspects of the text. Link is a fantasist in the grand tradition of Carol Emshwiller, John Crowley, and Robert Coover, blurring the lines between dreams, myths, and reality in exciting new ways. All this talent is on display in Stranger Things Happen, an astonishingly good collection — which gathers her World Fantasy Award winner “The Specialist’s Hat,” plus two stories new to the world, as well as eight others — into an assemblage of awesome proportions. From its campy retro Nancy Drew-style cover to its closing credits, this is a postmodern fairy-tale landmark.

Booklist
Link offers strange and tantalizing stories — contemporary fiction with a fairy-tale ambience — that explore the relationship between loss and death and the many ways we try to cope with both. She boldly weaves myth and fairy tale into contemporary life, drawing inspiration from the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, from the fairy tale of Cinderella, from the writings of C. S. Lewis, and from the true story of the Donner party’s descent into cannibalism. Meet Humphrey, one of Zeus’ many illegitimate sons, and June, his girlfriend, who decides to travel to Hades to bring Humphrey back. Learn the rules of being dead, and find out what really happened between Kay and the Snow Queen. Ask yourself what would have happened to the prince if he had never found the girl whose foot fit the glass slipper. Link uses the nonsensical to illuminate truth, blurring the distinctions between the mundane and the fantastic to tease out the underlying meanings of modern life.

Publishers Weekly
The 11 fantasies in this first collection from rising star Link are so quirky and exuberantly imagined that one is easily distracted from their surprisingly serious underpinnings of private pain and emotional estrangement. In “Water Off a Black Dog’s Back,” a naïve young man who has never known personal loss finds that the only way he can curry favor with his lover’s physically afflicted family is to suffer a bizarre amputation. The protagonist in “Travels with the Snow Queen” reconsiders her fairy-tale romance when she deconstructs the clichés of traditional fairy tales and realizes that their heroines inevitably sacrifice and suffer much more than their heroes do. Link favors impersonal and potentially off-putting postmodern narrative approaches, but draws the readers to the emotional core of her stories through vulnerable but brave characters who cope gamely with all the strangeness the world can throw their way, In the books’s most effective tale, “Vanishing Act,” a young girl’s efforts to magically reunite herself with her distant family by withdrawing from the world around her poignantly calls attention to the spiritual vacancies and absence of affection in the family she stays with. “The Specialist’s Hat” features twin sisters whose morbid obsessions seems due as much to their father’s parental neglect as their mother’s death. Although a few of the selections seem little more than awkward exercises on the absurd, the best shed a warm, weird light on their worlds, illuminating fresh perspectives and fantastic possibilities.

Kirkus Reviews
Eleven stories showcase a dexterous use of language and a startling, if frequently elusive, imagination as ghosts, aliens, and the living dead invade the most mundane aspects of everyday life. Newcomer Link references fairy tales, mythology, and bits of our common contemporary cultural experience, not to offer commentary but to take off on her own original riffs. So in “Shoe and Marriage” we meet a dictator’s widow, unavoidably reminiscent of Imelda Marcos, living in a museum that displays the shoes she took from her husband’s murder victims. The story, which also describes a bizarre beauty pageant, plays verbally with shoe metaphors from Cinderella’s slippers to Dorothy’s ruby reds, but what touches you is not the author’s verbal acrobatics but the widow’s deep sense of sorrow and horror. Like many of the pieces here, “Shoe and Marriage” joins disparate parts that don’t always fit together, but linear connections are not the aim. When she depends too much on pure cleverness, Link ends up sounding derivative and brittle. “Survivor’s Ball, or The Donner Party,” in which two travelers come to an inn where a creepy if lavish shindig is in full swing, reminds you too insistently of Poe. “Flying Lessons,” about a girl’s love for a boy whose desire to fly ends tragically (hint, hint), and “Travels With the Snow Queen,” in which the fairy tale is revamped to read cute, come across as writing-school literary. But at her best, Link produces oddly moving imagery. In “Louise’s Ghost,” two friends named Louise have overlapping affairs. The shared name at first seems like another joke, but the tale gradually digs deep into the emotionally charged waters of loss and redemption. Stylistic pyrotechnics light up a bizarre but emotionally truthful landscape. Link’s a writer to watch.

Staff recommendation by someone nice at Cody’s.

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Kelly Link’s collection of stories, Stranger Things Happen, really scores.

– Daniel Mendelsohn, New York Magazine

“Stranger Things Happen is a tremendously appealing book, and lovers of short fiction should fall over themselves getting out the door to find a copy.”

– Washington Post Book World

“quirky and exuberantly imagined….the best shed a warm, weird light on their worlds,
illuminating fresh perspectives and fantastic possibilities.”

– Publisher’s Weekly

“Stylistic pyrotechnics light up a bizarre but emotionally truthful landscape. Link’s a writer to watch.”

– Kirkus Reviews

“It is the tradition of the dust-jacket “blurb” to exaggerate the excellences of a book in hopes of enticing readers between its covers. But I do not follow that custom when I say that Stranger Things Happen is one of the very best books I have ever read. These stories will amaze, provoke, and intrigue. Best of all, they will delight. Kelly Link is terrific!“This is not blurbese. It is the living truth.”

– Fred Chappell, author of Family Gathering

“Finally, Kelly Link’s wonderful stories have been collected. My only complaint is the brevity of her oeuvre to date; as an avid reader of her work , I want her to continue to create more gems for me to read. I predict that “The Specialist’s Hat,” winner of the World Fantasy Award, will become part of the canon of classic supernatural tales.”

– Ellen Datlow, fiction editor, Scifiction.com

“I’ve been impatiently awaiting a collection of Kelly Link’s stories. Now that it’s here, it will sit in my library on that very short shelf of books I read again and again. For those who think Fantasy tired, Stranger Things Happen is a wake-up call.”

– Jeffrey Ford, author of The Beyond

“A set of stories that are by turns dazzling, funny, scary, and sexy, but only when they’re not all of these at once. Kelly Link has strangeness, charm and spin to spare. Writers better than this don’t happen.”

– Karen Joy Fowler, author of Sister Noon

“Kelly Link is probably the best short story writer currently out there, in any genre or none. She puts one word after another and makes real magic with them-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, author of American Gods

“Link’s writing is gorgeous, mischievous, sexy and unsettling. Unexpected images burst on your brain like soap bubbles on a dog’s tongue. I’ve been trying to imitate her since I first read one of her stories. It’s impossible. Instead I find myself curling up with a satisfied sigh and enjoying once more.”

– Nalo Hopkinson, author of Midnight Robber

“Kelly Link is the exact best and strangest and funniest short story writer on earth that you have never heard of at the exact moment you are reading these words and making them slightly inexact. Now pay for the book.”

– Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn

“Kelly Link is a brilliant writer. Her stories seem to come right out of your own dreams, the nice ones and the nightmares both. These stories will burrow right into your subconscious and stay with you forever.”

– Tim Powers, author of Declare

“Of all the books you’ll read this year, this is the one you’ll remember. Kelly Link’s stories are like gorgeous tattoos; they get under your skin and stay forever and change your life. Buy this book, read it, read it again, congratulate yourself, and then start buying Stranger Things Happen for your friends.”

– Sarah Smith, author of A Citizen of the Country

“Kelly Link makes spells, not stories. She is the carrier of an eerie, tender sorcery; each enchantment takes you like a curse, leaving you dizzy, wounded, and elated at once. Her vision is always compassionate, and frequently very funny–but don’t let that fool you. This book, like all real magic, is terribly dangerous. You open it at your peril.”

– Sean Stewart, author of Galveston

“If Kelly Link is not the “future of horror,” a ridiculous phrase, she ought to be. To have a future at all, horror in general, by which I might as well mean fiction in general, requires precisely her freshness, courage, intelligence, and resistance to received forms and values. Kelly Link seems always to speak from a deep, deeply personal, and unexpected standpoint. Story by story, she is creating new worlds, new frameworks for perception, right in front of our eyes. I think she is the most impressive writer of her generation.”

– Peter Straub, author of Magic Terror

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The Baum Plan – Reviews

by John Kessel

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The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories
John Kessel

Reviews

“In his first collection in a decade, Kessel jumps from place to place like a jolty time machine. In “Pride and Prometheus,” Frankenstein and Jane Austen intersect in an uncanny Victorian tale of unrequited love, while “A Lunar Quartet” introduces a matriarchal, hypersexual moon colony in the future. But as a group, these stories offer a sustained exploration of the ways gender dynamics can both empower and enslave us. Kessel’s wit sparkles throughout, peaking with the most uproariously weird phone-sex conversation you’ll ever read (”The Red Phone”).” A-
—Entertainment Weekly

“Dark, wacky, wide-ranging short stories.”
–Charlotte Observer

“Anyone who thinks genre writing can’t be literary deserves to have Kessel’s hefty new collection of stories dropped on his or her head.”
–Time Out Chicago

“Kessel proves himself again a master not just of science fiction, but also of the modern short story, crafting compelling characters and following them through plots that never fail to please — or to defy prediction.”
– Metro Magazine

“Kessel’s blend of dark humor and reality-stretching scenarios is consistently mesmerizing.”
– Booklist

“One of the best collections of the year.”
– Locus

“These well-crafted stories, full of elegantly drawn characters, deliver a powerful emotional punch.”
– Publishers Weekly

“Kessel is a deft stylist and a master of all his tools, whose range is nearly limitless.”
– – SciFi.com

“Invest. Invest now…. Your returns will be multitudinous.”
–The Fix

“A pleasant callback to the days when science-fiction authors read more than just science fiction.”
–The Stranger

Library Thing

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Mothers & Other Monsters – Talking Points

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• The Evil Stepmother: An Essay
• Interview with Maureen F. McHugh
• BookStandard.com Interview.
• Maureen McHugh & Sarah Willis in conversation parts 1, 2 & 3.
• Mothers & Other Monsters: hardcover | trade paperback | limited edition | ebook

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Maureen McHugh Interview

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• The Evil Stepmother: An Essay
• Talking Points
• BookStandard.com Interview.
• Maureen McHugh & Sarah Willis in conversation: parts 1, 2 & 3.
• Mothers & Other Monsters: hardcover | trade paperback | limited edition | ebook

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Mothers & Other Monsters – Limited Edition

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Poems | Reviews

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Mothers & Other Monsters – Reviews

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Mothers & Other Monsters
Maureen McHugh

Story Prize Finalist
Book Sense Notable Book

“All the gorgeously crafted stories in Maureen McHugh’s Mothers & Other Monsters have in common a profound understanding of the intricacies of human relationships, to which McHugh adds a touch of the fantastical. But here the fantastical seems so normal, so part of our everyday experience, that we simply accept McHugh’s premises, odd as they might be when you consider them independently of the tales themselves. The adjective that best represents this collection is ‘unsettling’. How else to describe stories in which a young woman meets a man she’s attracted to at a dog obedience class and discovers that she dreads introducing him to her dead brother (”In the Air”); “Ancestor Money,” in which a bequest entices a woman to leave her comfortable home in the afterlife for a visit to China; or “Laika Comes Back Safe,” the story of two teenagers who are drawn together by the fact that both have unhappy home lives, but whose friendship is doomed because one is a werewolf. Whether it’s alternative history that seems so real you start to question your own knowledge of the past (”The Lincoln Train”) or a tale of the horrifying end of a utopian colony (”The Cost To Be Wise”), McHugh shows that what many people might dismiss initially as genre fiction can become transcendent in the right hands. I was so impressed by these stories that I immediately went back and read McHugh’s first novel, China Mountain Zhang, which I had somehow missed, and enjoyed it thoroughly.”
– Nancy Pearl (Book Lust) on Morning Edition, “Books for a Rainy Day“

“Unpredictable and poetic work.”
– Cleveland Plain Dealer (Recommended Summer Reading)

“[McHugh] cherry-picks subtle magical or futuristic elements from the expansive genre library.”
– Angle

“McHugh’s prose style is unique.”
– LEO (Louisville Eccentric Observer)

“McHugh is enormously talented…. [She] has a light touch, a gentle sense of a humor, and a keen wit.”
– Strange Horizons

“Passion and precision.”
– Locus

“There’s not a single story that isn’t strong, and most are brilliant.”
– Ideomancer

“Clear, bright, and honest.”
– New York Review of Science Fiction

“Each story in this collection meditates in its own, odd way on the dynamics of families and the vagaries of being human. “Ancestor Money”" considers the demands of the afterlife and the expectations of the living; “The Lincoln Train” describes an alternate ending to the U.S. Civil War, in which former slave owners are shipped westward on crowded trains. “Nekropolis,” the germ of McHugh’s novel of the same title, gives a slightly different flavor to the origins of the story common to both versions. Other stories occur in settings closer to the known world and the tensions of families in it. In “Eight-Legged Story,” a stepmother comes to terms with being a replacement parent, and in “Frankenstein’s Daughter,” a woman deals with the health problems of her daughter’s clone, while her teenage son tries to show off to his friends by shoplifting. McHugh’s stories are hauntingly beautiful, driven by the difficult circumstances of their characters’ lives — slices of life well worth reading and rereading.”
– Booklist

“The 13 stories in McHugh’s debut collection offer poignant and sometimes heartwrenching explorations of personal relationships and their transformative power. In “Presence,” a woman helps her husband through an experimental therapy for his Alzheimer’s disease and, by the story’s end, is less his spouse than a nurturing mother to his developing personality. “In the Air” bridges three generations with its account of the different emotions a woman wrestles with as she anxiously tracks her wandering senile mother and her rebellious teenage daughter by means of biologically implanted homing devices. “Laika Comes Back Safe” represents so believably the feelings two school friends share about their lives in dysfunctional families that the revelation that one occasionally transforms into a werewolf seems entirely within the realm of possibility. Whether writing an alternate Civil War history in “The Lincoln Train” or a tale of extraterrestrial anthropology in “The Cost to Be Wise,” McHugh (Nekropolis) relates her stories as slices of ordinary life whose simplicity masks an emotional intensity more often found in poetry. The universality of these tales should break them out to the wider audience they deserve.”
– Publishers Weekly

“In this collection of stories, Maureen F. McHugh explores the subject of technology and identity, demonstrating that technology can only be a lens for what defines us as human, that is, our intimate relationship with the world around us and all the beings with whom we share that world. It is not technology which transforms us into monsters, but the danger of losing our sense of compassion toward ourselves and others in the face of monstrous choices.”
– Greenman Review

“Stories that abjure future or alternate-history settings for a here-and-now (sometimes problematically so) in which women, most of them mothers (though again often problematically) seek to negotiate landscapes for which their lives thus far have left them unprepared.”
– Tangent Online

“Moving.”
– Shortform

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Praise for McHugh’s previous books:

On Nekropolis:

• “Exquisite.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
• “This luminous tale of forbidden love in a near-future Morocco explores the evolution of human nature in a world where technology has redefined the meaning of the word human. . . . Speculative fiction at its best.” — Library Journal
• A New York Times Notable Book
• A Book Sense 76 Pick
• Amazon Best of the Year

On China Mountain Zhang:

• “McHugh’s achievement recalls the best work of Delany and Robinson without being in the least derivative.” — New York Times Notable Book
• Winner of the Tiptree, Lambda, and Locus Awards.

On Mission Child:

• “McHugh delivers another astonishing, compulsively readable novel.”–Booklist (starred review)
• “Fans of Ursula Le Guin will find much to admire in McHugh’s intelligent, carefully wrought novel of a world that is familiar yet very alien.” — Publishers Weekly
• “Beautiful . . . outstanding . . . McHugh is one of the finest U.S. fiction writers working today.” — Minneapolis Star-Tribune
• “Emotionally compelling . . . immensely satisfying . . . wonderfully structured and beautifully achieved . . . a splendid science fiction novel . . . McHugh makes an alien world and an imagined society feel compellingly real, and uses this setting to say something significant about being human.” — Cleveland Plain Dealer
• “Mission Child is an epic map of voice meeting voice, world meeting world–tragic, heartfelt, and vibrant with life.” — Jonathan Lethem, author of Fortress of Solitude

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Magic for Beginners – Reviews

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magic for beginners: stories
kelly link

Best of the Year Lists:

• “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.”
  – Time Magazine
• “Link’s writing shimmers with imagination.”
  – Salon
• “A mind-bending blast, as funny, disturbing and poignant as anything I’ve read this year.”
  – Capitol Times
• “The storyteller’s mantra — “It gets better” — come to life and multiplied.”
  – Village Voice
• “Link’s powerful prose places this collection into a class of its own.”
  – Boldtype (2005 Notable Books)
• San Francisco Chronicle.

Story Prize recommended reading list.

Reviews | UK reviews

“One of current fiction’s little-known treasures.”
– Time Magazine

“Dazzling…. One to savor.”
– Entertainment Weekly (A, Editor’s Choice)

– Washington Post Book World

“For Kelly Link, life is suddenly magic.”
– Detroit Free Press (Hillil Italie, AP)

“Magic for Beginners (Harvest, $14), is worth picking up. Doing so will put you in the hands of a true conjurer.”
– Vikas Turakhia, Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Kelly Link is the future of American short fiction.”
– Alexis Smith, Powells.com Staff Pick

“Fierce and witty.”
– Cleveland Plain Dealer

“These stories shimmer like impressionist paintings.”
– Montreal Gazette

“Kelly Link is the best short-fiction writer working in science fiction and fantasy today, and her new collection, Magic for Beginners, proves it.”
– Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing.net

“Link’s stories are delightfully playful, almost precocious, as she creates palimpsests of secret passages, hidden doors, quiet pulses of deeper meaning…. Link is fast becoming a major talent.”
– Boston Globe

“Fresh and unaffected, yet honed to the essential.”
– Salon

“Advanced alchemy.”
– The Believer

“Sinister and sublime.”
– Boston Phoenix

“Exuberantly eccentric.”
– Time Out New York

“Link’s powerful prose places this collection into a class of its own.”
– Boldtype

“Spellbinding.”
– Time Out Chicago

“Kelly Link writes from way out in left field.”
– Charlotte Observer

“A complete delight.”
– Rich Horton, Locus

“These tales are every bit as remarkable as those in her first collection.”
– Gary K. Wolfe, Locus

* “Not only does Link find fresh perspectives from which to explore familiar premises, she also forges ingenious connections between disparate images and narrative approaches to suggest a convincing alternate logic that shapes the worlds of her highly original fantasies.”
– Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“Cult-favorite fabulist and Shirley Jackson-esque master of the short story, returns with an eagerly-awaited new collection of thoughtfully strange tales that sprinkle the mundane with pixie dust, a dash of old-fashioned tragedy and a bit of gallows humor.”
– The Ruminator Review

“Truly magical, with masterfully crafted stories that are as dark as they are delightful….Sometimes hilarious, sometimes disconcerting, Link’s stories demonstrate her wicked sense of humor and genius wit.”
– Bookpage

“KELLY LINK has an uncanny knack for casting spells over her readers, for luring them into the dark places — the attic, the underworld, a realm beneath a hill. Her first collection of short stories, Stranger Things Happen, was published by Small Beer Press, a tiny independent publisher in Northampton founded by Link and Gavin J. Grant that, according to its Web site, is “committed to publishing short story collections and novels by authors we feel are slipping through the cracks.” These stories bend and transcend genre as Link stirs together myth, mystery, horror, and fantasy. Her second collection, Magic for Beginners (Small Beer Press, 272 pages, $24), is due out in July and promises the same mix of the sinister and the surreal. But the stories — more suggestive than they are descriptive — shouldn’t be pigeonholed as only for sci-fi and fantasy fans. Because for all Link’s use of fairy tale and phantasm, she roots her stories in the life that we know. The narrator in “The Faery Handbag,” for example, tells the story of her grandmother’s magic bag — a bag so black it feels like “when you stretch out your hand at night, to turn on a light, but all you feel is darkness” — which if opened correctly leads to a secret realm, and if opened incorrectly leads to a howling, hairless Cerberus-like dog. The story begins in the Garment District, in Kendall Square; there’s a sly reference to the Star Wars prequels; and, beyond the handbag, it’s a story of young lost love. Fairy tales and myths may be timeless, but these stories are of this moment.”
–Nina MacLaughlin, Boston Phoenix

“Link is the purest, most distinctive surrealist in America.”
– Booklist

“These nine stories are the kinds of stories for which literary phrases like “surrealism” and “magical realism” were invented, and I guess they’ll do, although they seem pretty stale and pale in the face of Link’s boundlessly creative prose. Let’s just say that nobody mixes the fantastical and the ordinary together quite like Link does, spinning tales that are both funny and disturbing, straightforward and elliptical, unreal and real.”
– The Capital Times

“One of the most fascinating writers practicing the craft today.”
– The Simon

“Wishful thinking on the brink of disaster.”
– Village Voice

“Magical realism meets horror meets postmodern absurdism. Very fresh and funny.”
– Michael Knight, Knoxville Metro Pulse Summer Reading Guide

“A bizarre and enchanting read, worth reading and re-reading.”
– Daily Nebraskan

“A wonderful rattlebag of fantastic tales from far beyond the concrete sidewalks and convenience stores we know. Like her first collection, Magic for Beginners uses humor as the main prism through which the author views her mostly hapless or at least happy-go-lucky characters. The strange attraction of Link’s fiction is that even when you’re not really sure what’s going on you’re having way too much fun reading to stop and rereading these tall tales is a positive pleasure.”
– Rich Rennicks Malaprop’s Bookstore/Cafe, Asheville, NC

“The stories in Magic for Beginners make their own strange, perfectly formed sense. Link creates these familiar, spooky, sometimes funny worlds with cats parented by witches, or a cheerleader hanging out with the devil, or creepifying rabbits. I’m always a little tense reading these stories. In the very best way, I never know what is coming next. If she only parcelled out one elegant sentence at a time I would beg for each one.”
– Pam Harcourt, Women & Children First, Chicago, IL

“I am in love with Kelly Link’s new collection of stories, Magic For Beginners, just out in hardcover. This book is a fairly complete list of my favorite things. She sort of summarized it best when she signed it for me: “Love, Magic, Zombies!” It’s fantastical, whimsical, and dead serious and it makes me interested in short stories again.”
– Alexander Chee, author Edinburgh, in Books To Watch Out For

Tiger Heron

UK reviews

“This is one of the most extraordinary and wonderful books of the year.”
—Time Out London, Mar. 27, 07

“Possibly grimmer than Grimm.”
—The Herald, Feb 2, 07

“Beautifully written short stories; eccentric and dark, the collection is an Alice in Wonderland for grown-ups.”
—Dazed and Confused

“Link’s writing is bold, tender, mischievous and unsettling.”
—Cork Evening Echo, Feb 17, 07

“These are weird and wacky tales, each with their own barmy internal logic which draws you in, flips you on your head and leaves you dizzy with disbelief…. Link’s extraordinary use of language is as haunting as the tales themselves. She blends fantasy and reality into an irresistible melange that, at its best, becomes a powerful metaphor for the unreliability of perception.”
—Jane Wessel, Venue (****)

“Link’s magic is to show the extraordinary in the ordinary and vice versa: no mean feat.”
—RTE Guide (*****)

“Just when you think you’ve read all the best magic and fantasy stories, along comes Link and the dull world is enchanted all over again. Her imagination floats free into her very own twilight zone.”
—Saga, Mar 07

“Whether she’s writing about a suburban family haunted by rabbits or a grandmother who keeps a world hidden in her handbag, Link’s stories are witty, moving and sometimes scary.”
—The Gloss Magazine, Feb 07

“A collection of nine stories from a talent to watch, this is a lyrical fantasy where the ordinary is made extraordinary.”
—The Bookseller, Oct 06

Advance Praise

“Kelly Link owns the most darkly playful voice in American fiction since Donald Barthelme. She is pushing the American short story into places that it hasn’t yet been pushed, while somehow managing to maintain a powerful connection to traditional forms and storytelling values.”
– Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

“The dream-logic of Magic for Beginners is 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, The Lovely Bones

“A wonderful rattlebag of fantastic tales from far beyond the concrete sidewalks and convenience stores we know. Like her first collection, Magic for Beginners uses humor as the main prism through which the author views her mostly hapless or at least happy-go-lucky characters. The strange attraction of Link’s fiction is that even when you’re not really sure what’s going on you’re having way too much fun reading to stop and rereading these tall tales is a positive pleasure.”
– Rich Rennicks Malaprop’s Bookstore/Cafe, Asheville, NC

“The stories in Magic for Beginners make their own strange, perfectly formed sense. Link creates these familiar, spooky, sometimes funny worlds with cats parented by witches, or a cheerleader hanging out with the devil, or creepifying rabbits. I’m always a little tense reading these stories. In the very best way, I never know what is coming next. If she only parcelled out one elegant sentence at a time I would beg for each one.”
– Pam Harcourt, Women & Children First, Chicago, IL

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