Get In Trouble
Kelly Link has been attracting some terrific press for her new collection of stories, Get in Trouble.
Scarlett Thomas in the New York Times welcomes you 'to the fabulous mind of Kelly Link, in which (as her previous readers will know) it is entirely possible to preserve a lost world inside a handbag and throw popcorn in from time to time in case its inhabitants—hill people from over 200 years ago—get hungry...It has taken Link 10 years to produce her new story collection, Get in Trouble, and it is just as brilliant as her last.'
'The stories here are effective because we believe them—not just their situations but also their hearts,' writes David L. Ulin in the LA Times. 'With Get in Trouble [Link] has created a series of fully articulated pocket universes, animated by a three-dimensional sense of character, of life.'
'No one has surpassed Link at crafting stories like miniature worlds, each one palatial on the inside, honeycombed with alternate realities and alarmingly seductive,' says Amy Gentry in the Chicago Tribune. 'A new Link collection is therefore more than just a good excuse for a trip to the bookstore. It's a zero-gravity vacation in a dust jacket.'
'Does any writer have a better, deeper instinct for the subterranean overlap between pop culture and myth?' asks Laura Miller at Salon. 'If Link has a superpower of her own, it’s her ability to root the fantastic elements of her fiction in meticulous observation of the real world.'
'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,' says Meg Wolitzer at NPR. 'As a writer, Link knows there's nothing she's "supposed" to do; her imaginative freedom is unmitigated by a need to counterbalance the weirdness with explanation.'
'Link is a master of the contemporary short story, and her zeitgeist is oddness,' says Cate Fricke at Bookslut. 'If many of our culture's most popular stories are post-apocalyptic these days, then Link's are post-strange.'
'I would rather read Kelly Link than breathe,' says David Larsen in the New Zealand Herald. 'This book is everything I wished for.'
'The best of [the stories in Get in Trouble] are mesmerizing,' says Moira Macdonald in the Seattle Times, 'creating tiny worlds (pocket universes, as the story “Light" describes) that look deceptively like ours might, if viewed through a warped but alluringly dark prism.'
'Kelly Link in a nutshell: inordinately brainy, always concise, darkly whimsical, and entertaining as heck,' says Eugenia Williamson in the Boston Globe. 'The intervening decade and the storybooks she published therein—Magic for Beginners, Pretty Monsters—established her as one of America’s finest writers in the short form, and perhaps its very best at conjuring mood.'
'Get in Trouble has earned a permanent residence on my bookshelf,' says Bustle. 'It’s a book I’ll carry with me and return to again and again, at every stage of life, to rediscover its wisdom and its realistic yet idiosyncratic views of the universe.'
'Nobody writes stories like Kelly Link,' says the Thousands. 'She’s a modern master of the short story, skewering our lives at every step.'
'Link is one of a kind.' The BBC recommends Get in Trouble as one of its ten books to read in February.
I’m drawn to any kind of story where a kind of joy-in-writing comes through. Kelly Link is interviewed in the New York Times.
Short stories do seem to be made for telling ghost stories. The Millions interview with Kelly Link.
Kelly Link made a playlist to listen to Get in Trouble by for Largehearted Boy.
Fairy tales are a very useful kind of storytelling shorthand...You can use fragments of them in ways that add dimension and weight to whatever other kinds of story you’re telling. Kelly Link on Get in Trouble and fairy tales in the Guardian.
Another interview with Kelly Link, this time over at Electric Lit.
The Wall Street Journal considers Link's work and 'slipstream fiction'.
Kelly Link's Get in Trouble is available now in bookshops and online.
