Stranger Things Happen: Stories

Kelly Link makes everything magical. Her words have lived inside my head since the day I opened this book. I don't care if you're a half-dead tweaker or a Head of State in a facist regime or a normal person who's just looking for something that'll make a plane ride less cramped and smelly...this is your book. It's for you. Waiting right here. The stories are spectacular in their breadth and their whimsy and their wonder. And then you can come back and re-read them, and they've changed a little, because you've changed a little...and the reading process becomes so pleasant and sublime that the other books on your shelves are going to get jealous.

I was astonished by most of the stories in this book- literal: dropped jaw, that was amazing, how can i become friends with this woman so she can tell me stories at night before I go to bed?Kelly Link manages to weave fairy tales, the paranormal, modern relationships, aliens and other bizzarities (I know that's not a word, but it should be) into some of the freshest, coolest fiction I've read in a long time.If you're looking for unsettling ghost stories, cousins who make themselves disappear, women that travel the underworld Orpheus style with twist on top of twist. This IS the book for you. (Even if you didn't know you were looking for those things.)I'd hate to go into great detail. It would ruin the magic of these incredible stories. If you like Aimee Bender, Stacey Richter, and/or Neil Gaiman during his Sandman days. Read no further, buy this book.

I read the review of this book on Salon.com and just had to rush out and buy this book. For a book published by an independent press, I was very impressed with the physicality of this book, how it is put together, the cool illustration on the front from "The Girl Detective." Kelly Link is really different from just about every modern writer out there. As well, each story in this collection is different from each other. Her style is really diverse, and impossible to really describe fully, but she always takes you in new directions that you wouldn't expect. Some of the stories affected me more than others, but there was not one in the collection that bored me. And for those of you who grew up on Nancy Drew like I did, the last story will really amuse you. If you are sick of all those books now that all seem as if they've been written by a computer or a room full of random monkeys (...), you should definitely check out Kelly Link.

Kelly Link is a marvel. I can't remember the last time I was so excited about a new writer, and these wonderful stories about travel, feet and footwear, and the intricacies of relationship are some of the finest pieces of short fiction of the last decade. 'The Specialist's Hat,' 'Travels with the Snow Queen,' and the indescribable 'The Girl Detective' combine horror and humor with fragments of mythology and popular culture, all shot through with a deceptively simple and utterly engaging narrative voice. These stories are unquestionably fantasies, but Link is one of those rare writers who understand fantasy's potential to give shape to such basic human realities as longing, isolation, and the need for love. Some of these pieces are experimental in form and content, but even these stories reveal a directness and emotional honesty that is all too rare, not only in genre fiction, but also in the increasingly mannered and self-referential fictions of postmodernism. They are also endearingly odd. These stories concern a woman who only seduces cellists, a farmer with a collection of artificial noses, and tap-dancing bank robbers. Strangeness is simply a pervasive feature of the landscape, a reminder that the peculiar is an inescapable fact of daily life.These are, quite simply, some of the best short stories that it has ever been my pleasure to read. Buy this book. Buy two, and give the other to someone you really like. Trust me on this one: you won't be disappointed.

I don't expect to read a stronger collection of fantasy, horror or magic realist fiction this year, and probably not next one, either. Kelly Link has been compared to Neil Gaiman, Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson and Jonathan Carroll, but ultimately she's elegantly and ineffably herself.This attractively designed trade paperback includes the deeply chilling and World-Fantasy-Award-winning "The Specialist's Hat" (the only ghost story to actually frighten me in the last two decades), the more quietly disturbing "Carnation, Lilly, Lilly, Rose" and "Water Off a Black Dog's Back," the classical fantasy tropes of "Flying Lessons" and "Travels With the Snow Queen," and the indescribable "The Girl Detective" (about a Girl Detective, Twelve Dancing Bank-Robbing Princesses, albino alligators, and the recurring theme of a journey to the Underworld, which we are told is "like the back of your closet, behind all those racks of clothes that you don't wear any more"). Two of these eleven stories are previously unpublished; the Science Fictional (well, kind of) "Most of My Friends are Two-Thirds Water" and the odd, funny, and devastatingly sad "Louise's Ghost," the final page of which I can't read without my eyes blurring.Not surprisingly, the newest stories are more polished than the earlier ones, and her voice is one that will always be evolving. I can't imagine her today using a phrase like "his teeth are sharp and eager as knives" (from "Flying Lessons," which despite that rare lapse is still marvelously well-written, more so than anything I'm ever likely to do). She began terrific and just keeps getting better and better. Damn her.