Audiobooks by Kelly Link

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. 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 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 winding 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 art of short fiction.

Kelly Link (Author), Dan Stevens, Dominic Hoffman, Ish Klein, Kristen Sieh, Patton Oswalt, Rebecca Lowman, Tanya Cubric (Narrator)

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Ghosts of the Shadow Market

The Shadow Market is a meeting point for faeries, werewolves, warlocks and vampires. There the Downworlders buy and sell magical objects, make dark bargains, and whisper secrets they do not want the Nephilim to know. Through two centuries, however, there has been a frequent visitor to the Shadow Market from the City of Bones, the very heart of the Shadowhunters. As a Silent Brother, Brother Zachariah is sworn keeper of the laws and lore of the Nephilim. But once he was a Shadowhunter called Jem Carstairs, and his love, then and always, is the warlock Tessa Gray. Follow Brother Zachariah and see, against the backdrop of the Shadow Market's dark dealing and festival, Anna Lightwood's doomed romance, Matthew Fairchild's great sin and Tessa Gray plunged into a world war. Valentine Morgenstern buys a soul at the Market and a young Jace Wayland's soul finds safe harbor. In the Market is hidden a lost heir and a beloved ghost, and no-one can save you once you have traded away your heart. Not even Brother Zachariah. The series features characters from Cassandra Clare's Mortal Instruments, Infernal Devices, Dark Artifices and the upcoming Last Hours series.

A Full Cast, Cassandra Clare, Kelly Link, Maureen Johnson, Robin Wasserman, Sarah Rees Brennan (Author), A Full Cast (Narrator)

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Learn About Loss

Cassandra Clare, Kelly Link (Author), Ross Butler (Narrator)

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Get In Trouble: stories

She has been hailed by Michael Chabon as “the most darkly playful voice in American fiction” and by Neil Gaiman as “a national treasure.” Now Kelly Link’s eagerly awaited new collection—her first for adult readers in a decade—proves indelibly that this bewitchingly original writer is among the finest we have. Link has won an ardent following for her ability, with each new short story, to take readers deeply into an unforgettable, brilliantly constructed fictional universe. The nine exquisite examples in this collection show her in full command of her formidable powers. In “The Summer People,” a young girl in rural North Carolina serves as uneasy caretaker to the mysterious, never-quite-glimpsed visitors who inhabit the cottage behind her house. In “I Can See Right Through You,” a middle-aged movie star makes a disturbing trip to the Florida swamp where his former on- and off-screen love interest is shooting a ghost-hunting reality show. In “The New Boyfriend,” a suburban slumber party takes an unusual turn, and a teenage friendship is tested, when the spoiled birthday girl opens her big present: a life-size animated doll. Hurricanes, astronauts, evil twins, bootleggers, Ouija boards, iguanas, The Wizard of Oz, superheroes, the Pyramids . . . These are just some of the talismans of an imagination as capacious and as full of wonder as that of any writer today. But as fantastical as these stories can be, they are always grounded by sly humor and an innate generosity of feeling for the frailty—and the hidden strengths—of human beings. In Get in Trouble, this one-of-a-kind talent expands the boundaries of what short fiction can do. Read by a Full Cast: “The Summer People”… read by Grace Blewer “I Can See Right Through You”… read by Kirby Heyborne “Secret Identity”… read by Tara Sands “Valley of the Girls”… read by Robbie Daymond “Origin Story”… read by Rebecca Lowman “The Lesson”… read by Cassandra Campbell “The New Boyfriend”… read by Ish Klein “Two Houses” … read by Susan Duerden “Light” … read by Kirsten Potter Advance praise for Get in Trouble “Kelly Link is the author whose books I would take to the proverbial desert island. Link’s work is always darkly funny, sexy, frightening, and truly weird—she can dismantle and remake the world in a paragraph. Get in Trouble offers further proof that she belongs on every reader’s bookshelf.”—Karen Russell “Get in Trouble contains some of Link’s best writing yet. These are not so much small fictions as windows onto entire worlds. This is a brilliant, giddying read.”—Sarah Waters “Kelly Link is one of my all-time favorite writers. You know who else would love her? Kafka and Lewis Carroll. Like them, she knows the things the rest of us don’t. But she also knows how to make well-known heartbreaks glow with strange new lights.”—Arthur Phillips “Kelly Link’s prose is conveyed in details so startling and fine that 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.”—Téa Obreht “Kelly Link is inimitable. Her stories are like nothing else, dark yet sparkling with her unique brand of fairy dust. This is the most marvelous kind of trouble to get in.”—Erin Morgenstern “Every one of the stories in this collection is like a one-of-a-kind jack-in-the-box. How does Kelly Link understand our pains and longings and memories and even our futures so well?”—Yiyun Li “Close your mouth and get out of the way, because here comes Kelly Link, than whom no one is better.”—Peter Straub “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

Kelly Link (Author), Various Narrators, Various Narrators (Narrator)

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Magic for Beginners: Stories

Perfect for readers of George Saunders, Karen Russell, Neil Gaiman, and Aimee Bender, Magic for Beginners is an exquisite, dreamlike dispatch from a virtuoso storyteller who can do seemingly anything. Kelly Link reconstructs modern life through an intoxicating prism, conjuring up unforgettable worlds with humor and humanity. These stories are at once ingenious and deeply moving. They leave the reader astonished and exhilarated. Includes an exclusive conversation between Kelly Link and Joe Hill Read by Mark Bramhall, Cassandra Campbell, Danny Campbell, Robbie Daymond, Kirby Heyborne, Rebecca Lowman, Arthur Morey, Lorna Raver and Meera Simhan Praise for Magic for Beginners “A sorceress to be reckoned with.”—The New York Times Book Review “[Kelly] 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.”—Lev Grossman, Time “She is unique and should be declared a national treasure.”—Neil Gaiman “Funny, scary, surprising and powerfully moving within the span of a single story or even a single sentence.”—Karen Russell, The Miami Herald “This is what certain readers live for: fiction that makes the world instead of merely mimicking it.”—Audrey Niffenegger “[These] exquisite stories mix the aggravations and epiphanies of everyday life with the stuff that legends, dreams and nightmares are made of.”—Laura Miller, Salon, Best Books of the Decade “A major talent . . . Like George Saunders, [Link] can’t dismiss the hidden things that tap on our windows at night.”—The Boston Globe “The most darkly playful voice in American fiction.”—Michael Chabon “I think she is the most impressive writer of her generation.”—Peter Straub “Link’s world is one to savor. [Grade:] A”—Entertainment Weekly “Intricate, wildly imaginative and totally wonderful . . . will fill you with awe and joy.”—NPR

Kelly Link (Author), Various Readers, Various Readers (Narrator)

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Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories

Imagine an alternate universe where romance and technology reign. Where tinkerers and dreamers craft and recraft a world of automatons, ornate clockworks, calculating machines, and other marvels that never were. Where scientists and schoolgirls, fair folk and Romans, intergalactic bandits, Utopian revolutionaries, and intrepid orphans - decked out in corsets, clockwerk suits, and tall black boots - solve dastardly crimes, escape from monstrous predicaments, consult oracles, and hover over volcanoes in steam-powered airships. Here, in the first major steampunk anthology for young adults, fourteen masters of speculative fiction, including two graphic storytellers, embrace the genre's established blend of sci-fi and fantasy, action and adventure, history and romance, and refashion it in surprising ways and in settings as diverse as Canada, New Zealand, Appalachia, Wales, ancient Rome, future Australia, and alternate California. Visionaries Link and Grant have invited all-new interpretations, explorations, and expansions, taking a genre already rich, strange, and inventive in the extreme and challenging contributors to remake it from the ground up. The result is an anthology that defies even as it defines the genre.

Gavin J. Grant (editor), Kelly Link, Kelly Link (editor) (Author), Arthur Morey, Julia Whelan, Nico Evers-Swindell, Sarah Coomes, Shannon Mcmanus, Various Readers, Various Readers (Narrator)

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