LoveReading Says
I came to Kelly Link’s short stories through an earlier collection, Magic for Beginners. I felt the world shift around me as I read. No other author, for me, has so powerfully fused together the fantastical with the human in narrative.
I prefer the word reveal to the word twist, because that’s what it should do – reveal the true nature of the story you’re reading. There is always a moment at the end of each Kelly Link story when the world transforms and the truth of things is revealed in all its odd terror and beauty.
Get in Trouble, her Pulitzer shortlisted collection, changed the way I write, and maybe even how I see the world, a little. Whether it’s a superhero whose only power is to hover a few feet off the ground, or a family trapped into a fairy bargain in rural Kentucky, Kelly Link makes the fantastical seem real, and vice versa.
‘The Ghost Boyfriend,’ about a new kind of doll for teenage girls, ‘I Can See Right through You,’ about an aging movie star visiting his ex-girlfriend on the set of her ghost hunting reality TV show, and ‘Two Houses,’ a tale about a haunted spaceship are particular favourites of mine.
The final story about pocket worlds is almost a metaphor for the book – you slip in and out of her universes with ease, dazzled by each one.
Selected by Catriona Ward, Our Winter 2022 Guest Editor. Click here to read the full Guest Editor Piece.
LoveReading
About Get in Trouble
Fantastic, fantastical and utterly incomparable, Get in Trouble rummages in the cupboards of our psyches and pulls out fierce truths about 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 . . . Strange, dark and wry, the stories in Get in Trouble reveal Kelly Link at the height of her creative powers and stretch the boundaries of the human imagination.
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Kelly Link Press Reviews
Breathtaking -
THE TIMES -
A brilliant, giddying read -- SARAH WATERS
Funny, moving, tender, brave and dangerous. She is unique -- NEIL GAIMAN
Welcome to the fabulous mind of Kelly Link. Beautifully written [and] daring -- SCARLETT THOMAS -NEW YORK TIMES
Link's prose and ideas dazzle - GUARDIAN
Link's stories play in a place few writers go, a netherworld between literature and fantasy, Alice Munro and JK Rowling - TIME
Filled with pocket universes, each tale crackling with the unexpected. The most marvelous kind of trouble to get in -- ERIN MORGENSTERN
Very much fun -- @MARGARETATWOOD
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
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
Kelly Link is the literary descendant of Jorge Luis Borges and Franz Kafka -- AUDREY NIFFENEGGER
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
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
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
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 - New York Times Book Review
