Get in Trouble: Stories - Hardcover

Link, Kelly

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1782113835 ISBN 13: 9781782113836

Publisher: Canongate Books, 2015

Synopsis

Fantastic, fantastical and utterly incomparable, Kelly Link's new collection explores 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 . . .

With each story she weaves, Link takes readers deep into an unforgettable, brilliantly constructed universe. Strange, dark and wry, Get in Trouble reveals Kelly Link at the height of her creative powers and stretches the boundaries of what fiction can do.

About this title

Review

Kelly Link is inimitable. Her tales 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)

Link's stories are always a treat, and Get In Trouble contains some of her best writing yet. Richly imagined, intellectually teasing: these are not so much small fictions as windows on to entire worlds. A brilliant, giddying read (SARAH WATERS)

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)

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)

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)

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)

Kelly Link is the literary descendant of Jorge Luis Borges and Franz Kafka (AUDREY NIFFENEGGER)

Link's stories play in a place few writers go, a netherworld between literature and fantasy, Alice Munro and JK Rowling (TIME)

Wonderfully odd and original [and] very scary indeed (SARAH WATERS)

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 (TÉA OBREHT)

Franz Kafka with a better understanding of lady's footwear and bad first dates. (KAREN RUSSELL)

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)

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 --Erin Morgenstern

Book Description

'A brilliant, giddying read' Sarah Waters

About this edition

• Publisher: Canongate Books
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1782113835
• ISBN 13: 9781782113836
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352