CANR
WORK TITLE: The Book of Love
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.kellylink.net/
CITY: Northampton
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 291
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born July 19, 1969, in Miami, FL; married Gavin J. Grant (a publisher), 2001; children: Ursula.
EDUCATION:Columbia University, B.A.; University of North Carolina, M.F.A.; Clarion East Writing Workshop.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and teacher. Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, coeditor; Small Beer Press, Northampton, MA, co-owner; Book Moon bookstore, Easthampton, MA, owner; Lenoir–Rhyne University, teacher. Also teaches writing seminars and at numerous colleges.
AWARDS:James Tiptree, Jr., Award, 1997, for “Travels with the Snow Queen”; World Fantasy Award, 1999, for “The Specialist’s Hat”; Nebula Award, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, 2002, for “Louise’s Ghost”; Book of the Year, Salon.com, 2002, for Stranger Things Happen; Nebula Award, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, 2005, for “The Faery Handbag”; Nebula Award, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, 2005, for Magic for Beginners; Locus Award for best novella, 2009, for “Pretty Monsters”; World Fantasy Special Award—Professional, 2009, for her work with Small Beer Press; O. Henry Prize, 2013, for “The Summer People”; Anthology Prize, World Fantasy Awards, 2015, for Monstrous Affections: An Anthology of Beastly Tales; Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for Best Short Fiction of 2015, 2016, for “The Game of Smash and Recovery;” MacArthur Fellow “Genuis Grant,” MacArthur Foundation, 2018; best collection prize, Locus Awards, 2024, for White Cat, Black Dog.
WRITINGS
Also author of the novelette “The Faery Handbag.” Contributor of short fiction to publications, including Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Best American Short Stories, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards.
SIDELIGHTS
Kelly Link is the “reigning queen of the strange, wonderful, fantastical short story,” according to Millions website contributor Hilary Lawlor, who noted in a 2015 interview with the author that Link “has been delighting the fiction world with her creations for nearly twenty years.” Writing in the Chicago Tribune Online, Amy Gentry also had praise for Link’s work, noting: “Since her 2001 debut, Stranger Things Happen, no one has surpassed Link at crafting stories like miniature worlds, each one palatial on the inside, honeycombed with alternate realities and alarmingly seductive.” Publishers Weekly contributor Julie Buntin noted that from the very beginning of her writing career, “strangeness has possessed Link’s fiction.” Link commented on this aspect of her work in her interview with Buntin: “If I put a ghost or a vampire or a superhero into a story, I’m promising a certain amount of fun. Narrative energy. I mean, who doesn’t want to hear a ghost story? So already the reader is going to be giving you a certain amount of attention.” In an Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts interview with Brian Attebery, Link further commented on the fantastical aspect of her writing: “Fairy tale/folkloric or mythic pattern overlays contemporary narrative and the way that we see our own lives. So if you are interested in writing contemporary fantasy, the reader is going to supply a lot of the basic structure for you. This is especially useful in short stories, where you have so little space. I don’t know that I separate out the realism from the fantastic as I work. But I’m always writing about the fantastic, about those moments where you see the pattern that shapes your habits of narrative thought—stories about stories.”
Link is the author of a number of short-story collections for adults and young readers, including her debut collection, Stranger Things Happen, as well as Magic for Beginners, Pretty Monsters, and Get in Trouble: Stories. Link has edited a number of anthologies with her husband, Gavin J. Grant, and Link is also the coeditor of the magazine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, “perhaps the least intimidating zine name ever concocted,” according to a Broken Pencil reviewer. The magazine publishes works of speculative fiction. Additionally, Link is co-owner of Small Beer Press, which published her first book. Speaking with NPR.org contributor Audie Cornish, Link remarked on the inspiration for her stories, calling her fiction a product of “night time logic.” Link added: “It’s much more like dream logic except that, you know, when you wake up from a dream, you think, well, that didn’t make sense. And I think night time logic in stories you think, I don’t understand why that made sense, but I feel there was a kind of an emotional truth to it.” Link further noted to Cornish that as a child she read everything she could find: “My dad read me all of Tolkien when I was in kindergarten. My mom read me all of C.S. Lewis. And then once I learned how to read, I was a little bit slow. I would just go to the library and sort of work my way through the shelves.”
“I am very, very fond of the kinds of fiction that get sort of stuck off in their own separate pens,” Link explained to Boston Phoenix interviewer Nina Maclaughlin. “There’s an energy there, and you’re able to break rules in more interesting ways.” In Link’s work, werewolves haunt private girls’ schools; darkness and dread coexist with sarcasm and funniness. “One of the great things about writing fantasy, or writing about very dramatic events,” Link went on to say, “is getting to sift through the emotional responses. Because the larger the emotional response, the harder it is to distinguish between humor or fear or anger.” Maclaughlin described the essence of Link’s work as a “mythic quality.” The author, said Maclaughlin, is “the rare writer who’s able to mix these of-the-moment items, products, and activities with the eternal, the timeless: quests, coming of age, … and the day-to-day mysteries of being human.” In a New York Times Online interview, Link commented on the sorts of stories she is personally drawn to as a reader: “I love ghost stories with all my heart. Aside from that, I’m drawn to any kind of story where a kind of joy-in-writing comes through. If there’s the sense that the writer is working their way through a kind of interesting problem (moral, structural, philosophical), that’s a bonus. I have a lot less patience now for stories where the writer seems to feel some sort of contempt or distaste for any of the characters in their stories, or for their audience.”
Stranger Things Happen, Link’s first collection, was named Salon.com’s Book of the Year, and three of the individual stories won prestigious awards of their own. Andrew O’Hehir in the New York Times Book Review referred to Link’s Stranger Things Happen as an “often dazzling debut collection” that is “not entirely of this world.” Link often mixes reality with fantasy, preferring to keep her readers on guard. In her Salon.com interview with Miller, Link admitted: “I like the idea of taking things that are alien and making them seem really very cozy and familiar.” Then she added: “On the other hand, what I like about more realistic fiction … is the way it looks at familiar things and makes them seem so strange. What I hope to do is to mix those up, so that you’re constantly feeling comfortable and unsettled at the same time.” Booklist contributor Bonnie Johnston commented on Link’s technique by describing her stories as “strange and tantalizing,” adding that she gives her fiction a “fairy-tale ambience” as she “boldly weaves myth and fairy tale into contemporary life.”
The story “Travels with the Snow Queen” won the James Tiptree, Jr., Award, and is loosely based on the fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, but with a slight feminist twist. In Link’s version of the story, the heroine is all grown up and is searching for her lover, who has left her for the Snow Queen. In the process of the search, she compiles a list of things that she plans to recite upon finding her lover. This list, as quoted by Chris Barzak in a review for the Strange Horizons website, includes: “I never really liked your friends all that much” and “After you left, I didn’t water your plants on purpose. They’re all dead.” Her boyfriend was last seen by a clerk at a corner store, who relates that the missing lover left with a beautiful woman who was riding in a sleigh pulled by white geese. As she searches for her lover, the young woman meets several larger-than-life characters and “more talking animals than she would have preferred,” wrote Laura Miller in Salon.com.
The protagonist decides, by the end of her search, that she does not really want her lover to return to her after all. As a contributor to Publishers Weekly pointed out, the protagonist eventually “reconsiders her fairy-tale romance when she deconstructs the clichés of traditional fairy tales and realizes that their heroines inevitably sacrifice and suffer much more than their heroes do.”
Though Link is not the only writer who has put a feminist twist on old fairy tales, Miller, in her review for Salon.com, noted that Link’s style makes her effort distinctive. “Link’s writing is cool, controlled and scrupulously spare,” Miller wrote, adding that, while other writers have celebrated female desire, “Link prefers to tally up its costs.”
In her second collection of stories, Magic for Beginners, Link presents nine stories that take place in the real, everyday world but contain fantastical elements. For example, a convenience-store clerk who works nights has as his regular customers zombies and women with ghost dogs. In another tale, when a city family moves to the suburbs, they find that their house seems to be mysteriously guarded by a cadre of rabbits.
Magic for Beginners has received widespread praise from reviewers. Calling the book a “potent blend of horror and magic realism and postmodern absurdism,” New York Times reviewer Michael Knight noted Link’s talent for undermining readers’ expectations in these stories. Events do not make logical sense, and Link avoids attaching any obvious symbolic meaning to her plots. The effect, said Knight, is weird and original, but also accessible and funny. “Even when I didn’t know what to make of her stories,” he concluded, “I couldn’t put them out of my mind. That sort of resonance, that lingering, haunting effect, is the product of real magic, and Kelly Link is no doubt a sorceress to be reckoned with.”
“Link is the purest, most distinctive surrealist in America,” wrote Ray Olson in Booklist. A Publishers Weekly contributor called the stories in Magic for Beginners “effervescent blends of quirky humor and pathos that transform stock themes of genre fiction into the stuff of … lyrical fantasy.”
Link’s third story collection, Pretty Monsters, is aimed at a young adult readership but, as several reviewers pointed out, is equally appealing to adults. Many protagonists in this book are teenagers, and they encounter typical challenges associated with this age: sexual feelings, romance, bullying, and clashes with authority figures. In the opening story, “The Wrong Grave,” teenage Miles has impetuously placed his love poems in his dead girlfriend’s casket; later, he decides to dig up her body to retrieve them, only to find a different inhabitant of the grave. Writing in the Boston Globe, Julie Wittes Schlack praised this story for its exquisite “juxtaposition of creepy ghostliness, adolescent frustration, and beautifully nuanced grief.” Other stories include “Monster,” in which a scout troop on a camping trip meets a monster in the woods, and “The Surfer,” which tells the story of Don, a young soccer player who hunkers down in Costa Rica during a flu epidemic while awaiting the return of aliens led by the surfer of the title. “Link’s world-building in this story is masterful,” observed Bri Lafond in a Hipsterbookclub website review. Halas, the protagonist of “The Wizards of Perfil,” is a telepath who has been separated from her family by war and is now forced to serve the wizards of the title. But rather than using their magic powers to help the girl, the wizards are selfish and lazy, and Halal is left to her own devices to make her way forward.
As Schlack observed of Pretty Monsters as a whole, Link places her adolescent characters into situations where they must cope “with big forces beyond their control—divorce, war, full moons, and magic.” And in this process, they “discover their own power and compassion, and in so doing, create their own stories.” Fantasy website reviewer Marguerite Croft made a similar point, observing that the stories in Pretty Monsters “explore relationships, particularly parental relationships; they explore the nature of story and narrative.” What is more, added Croft, Link’s stories “not only … entertain us, they reflect the world around us in a funhouse mirror.”
Link worked with her husband, Gavin J. Grant, to edit Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories, fourteen short stories in the genre of steampunk. Contributors include Cassandra Clare, Cory Doctorow, Garth Nix, Holly Black, and Link, among others. Link adds her award-winning short story “The Summer People” to this anthology, which not only honors the traditional themes of steampunk—“clockwork automatons, brass goggles, mad scientists, brave adventurers, and Victorian imagery,” as School Library Journal reviewer Heather M. Campbell enumerated them—but also pushes the boundaries in new ways. For example, Black’s clockwork automaton in “Everything Amiable and Obliging” falls in love with its employer’s daughter. Link’s contribution is “lovely and eerily sad,” according to Campbell.
Campbell went on to note that there is “not a weak story” in this “exceptional anthology.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer called Steampunk! a “delicious mix of original stories from fourteen skilled writers and artists.” A Kirkus Reviews critic commended the contributions as “rich with much more than just steam and brass fittings” in this “excellent collection, full of unexpected delights.” Horn Book writer Katie Bircher felt that the authors “manage to take their characters—and readers—to bold new frontiers” with tales that “push the boundaries of steampunk.” Likewise, Booklist contributor Lynn Rutan noted that the “characters in this imaginative collection shine, and there isn’t a weak story in the mix; each one offers depth and delight.”
Link again teamed up with her husband to edit Monstrous Affections: An Anthology of Beastly Tales, a gathering of fifteen tales from writers such as M.T. Anderson, Paolo Bacigalupi, Nathan Ballingrud. Holly Black, Sarah Rees Brennan, Cassandra Clare, Nalo Hopkinson, Dylan Horrocks, and Link, among others. As the title suggests, these stories targeted for a teen audience are guaranteed to frighten, employing the common trope of monsters. Such monsters range from vampires to ghosts, and though the tales feature monsters in various guises, “the heart of each story is the experience of being a teen,” according to Booklist contributor Snow Wildsmith.
Other reviewers also had praise for Monstrous Affectations. Writing in Voice of Youth Advocates, Donna Phillips noted: “Teachers looking for accomplished writing, complex points of view, ambiguous plots, and rich themes will enjoy exploring these stories—if they dare.” A Publishers Weekly contributor called this an “engrossing, morally complex anthology of fifteen stories centered on the seemingly antagonistic concepts of monsters and love.” Similarly, Wildsmith admired the “creepy, atmospheric tales.” A Kirkus Reviews critic was also impressed with the anthology, remarking: “Short stories with otherworldly creatures may be a dime a dozen, but rarely do they offer such nuanced scope.” Likewise, Campbell, writing in School Library Journal, concluded: “Long after the last page is turned, these tales will linger in readers’ brains, in their closets, under their beds, and in the shadows.”
Get in Trouble is Link’s first new anthology for adults in a decade, and offers nine tales for fans and new readers. Among these is her previously anthologized award winner, “The Summer People,” about a young girl left on her own to take care of very strange people in an equally strange house. Another young narrator appears in “Secret Identity,” in which a fifteen-year-old arrives in New York to meet in the flesh the older man she has met online—with a peculiar outcome. Astronauts awake from suspended animation and pass the time in space telling ghost stories in “Two Houses,” while an actor past his productive years as an on-screen vampire is featured in “I Can See Right through You.”
“Humor, outrageous concepts, and first-class world building make these stories unforgettable,” commented Ellen Loughran in Booklist. A Kirkus Reviews critic also thought that these tales are as “haunting as anything the Grimm brothers could have come up with.” The critic added: “Exquisite, cruelly wise and the opposite of reassuring, these stories linger like dreams.” A Publishers Weekly contributor similarly noted: “Link’s characters, driven by yearning and obsession, not only get in trouble but seek trouble out-to spectacular effect.” Gentry felt that the stories included in Get in Trouble are “vintage Link, exploring the universe around the corner, where waitresses and mutants, superheroes and dentists shudder at the depthless mysteries of the human heart.” Gentry added: “Link continues to inhabit a wide range of voices with an offbeat sensibility that never curdles into kitsch, thanks to her nearly infallible ear.” Washington Post Online reviewer Michael Dirda also had praise for this collection, noting that the stories demonstrate “Link’s mastery and self-confidence as an author.” Dirda went on to remark: “She believes in her stories, no matter how off the wall they might seem, and she makes her readers believe in them, too.” Similarly, Los Angeles Times Online contributor David L. Ulin concluded: “With Get in Trouble, [Link] has created a series of fully articulated pocket universes, animated by a three-dimensional sense of character, of life.”
[open new]
Link’s New York Times Editors’ Choice anthology of seven novelette stories, White Cat, Black Dog, mixes fairy tales with real world matters of aging, love, connection, and revenge. Inspired by the Brothers Grimm, French lore, and Scottish ballads, the stories utilize flat characterization, bloody plots, and creep companions, but also reveal mundane, contemporary situations. In “The White Cat’s Divorce,” a billionaire sends his sons out on a series of bizarre quests to determine which is worthy of their inheritance. In “Skinder’s Veil,” a grad student house sits in a remote cabin while finishing his dissertation only to learn that the house’s owner is Death and the house is a portal to another world letting in strange denizens. In the creepy, “The White Road,” mysterious people walk down the road and tear people apart as society collapses.
The stories reveal lost characters searching to know themselves and the world around them. In an interview with J. W. McCormack in Publishers Weekly, Link explained that she chose fairy tales as a way to discover various relationships between people because “I could use fairy tales in a way that was not a direct retelling but could retain some of the extraordinary qualities of colors, food, or animals… Fairy tales depend on what the reader brings to them.”
“Link’s writing has been gradually growing in power. White Cat, Black Dog marks a glittering new height in the literature of the weird. Don’t come looking for happy ever afters,” praised Philip Womack in Spectator. “This is fiction that pulls you swiftly into its world and then holds you completely, lingering like an especially intense dream. Enchanting, mesmerizing, brilliant work,” according to a Kirkus Reviews contributor. Writing in the Brooklyn Rail, Yvonne C. Garrett remarked: “This is a truly well-wrought and magical work, rather than simple updates of fairy tales or fables, these stories have a chilling core and deep observations on modern life that we can all learn from.”
A master of short fiction, Link published her first full-length novel, The Book of Love, in 2024. In the town of Lovesend, Massachusetts, teenagers Laura, bandmember Daniel, and friend Mo went missing nearly a year ago, presumed dead, but reappear alive in their high school’s music classroom. Along with them is a fourth, a magical shapeshifter named Bogomil. The students’ music teacher, Mr. Anabin, seems to know what happened to them and offers them a bargain, to perform a series of magical tasks, after which two will remain alive and two will return to the realm of the dead. Laura reconnects with her jealous, rebellious sister Susanna; nurturer Daniel, who was secretly dating Susanna, returns to taking care of his siblings; Mo, a gay Black orphan lost his beloved grandmother while he was dead.
In New York Times Book Review, Amal El-Mohtar remarked on Link’s transformation from short form to novel, saying: “Seven years in the making, ‘The Book of Love’—long, but never boring—enacts a transformation of a different kind: It is our world that must expand to accommodate it, we who must evolve our understanding of what a fantasy novel can be.” Philip Womack said in Spectator: “the writing sparkles with wit and colour, and there is much camp weirdness and shimmering grandeur… This is entertaining fantasy and also, in its own way, experimental.”
[close new]
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, July, 2001, Bonnie Johnston, review of Stranger Things Happen, p. 1991; June 1, 2005, Ray Olson, review of Magic for Beginners, p. 1768; September 15, 2008, Ian Chipman, review of Pretty Monsters, p. 55; November 1, 2011, Lynn Rutan, review of Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories, p. 61; October 1, 2014, Snow Wildsmith, review of Monstrous Affections: An Anthology of Beastly Tales, p. 78; January 1, 2015, Ellen Loughran, review of Get in Trouble, p. 36.
Boston Globe, January 20, 2009, Julie Wittes Schlack, review of Pretty Monsters.
Boston Phoenix, October 2, 2008, Nina Maclaughlin, “Ghost Writer: The Haunted World of Kelly Link.”
Broken Pencil, summer, 2010, Alex Gurnham, review of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, p. 39; January, 2014, review of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, p. 42.
Brooklyn Rail, April 2023, Yvonne C. Garrett, review of White Cat, Black Dog, p. 91, March 2024, Yvonne C. Garrett, review of The Book of Love, p. 111.
Guardian (London, England), February 25, 2015, Stuart Kelly, review of Get in Trouble.
Horn Book, September-October, 2011, Katie Bircher, review of Steampunk!, p. 90.
Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, fall, 2012, Sydney Duncan, “Kelly Link: An Introduction,” p. 413; fall, 2013, Brian Attebery, “A Conversation with Kelly Link.” p. 415.
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2008, review of Pretty Monsters; August 15, 2011, review of Steampunk!, July 15, 2014, review of Monstrous Affections, December 15, 2014, review of Get in Trouble; February 15, 2023, review of White Cat, Black Dog; December 1, 2023, review of The Book of Love.
Library Journal, December 1, 2014, Reba Leiding, review of Get in Trouble, p. 100.
New York Times, August 7, 2005, Michael Knight, review of Magic for Beginners.
New York Times Book Review, November 11, 2001, Andrew O’Hehir, “Hell’s Belles”; March 17, 2024, Amal El-Mohtar, review of The Book of Love, p. 9.
Publishers Weekly, June 25, 2001, review of Stranger Things Happen, p. 56; June 6, 2005, review of Magic for Beginners, p. 45; July 25, 2005, James Ireland Baker, “Maverick Fabulist: Kelly Link, Rising Star, Goes Her Own Way,” p. 36; December 31, 2007, review of The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, p. 25; September 8, 2008, review of Pretty Monsters, p. 51; August 8, 2011, review of Steampunk!, p. 50; July 21, 2014, review of Monstrous Affections, p. 186; September 15, 2014, review of Get in trouble, p. 1; annual, 2014, review of Monstrous Affections, p. 97; February 2, 2015, Julie Buntin, “Who Doesn’t Want to Hear a Ghost,” p. 29; January 9, 2023, J.W. McCormack, “PW Talks with Kelly Link,” p. 45.
School Library Journal, October 1, 2008, Shelley Huntington, review of Pretty Monsters, p. 152; September, 2014, Heather M. Campbell, review of Monstrous Affections, p. 146; September, 2011, Heather M. Campbell, review of Steampunk!, p. 160.
Spectator, April 1, 2023, Philip Womack, review of White Cat, Black Dog, p. 34; February 3, 2024, Philip Womack, review of The Book of Love, p. 35.
Voice of Youth Advocates, October, 2014, Donna Phillips, review of Monstrous Affections, p. 86.
Washington Post, March 17, 2023, Anita Felicelli, “Book World: Kelly Link Wants to Push Us Outside of Our Comfort Zone,” review of White Cat, Black Dog.
ONLINE
Beatrice, http://www.beatrice.com/ (October 21, 2009), Ron Hogan, “Beatrice Interview with Kelly Link.”
BookPage, http://www.bookpage.com/ (October 21, 2009), Becky Ohlsen, review of Pretty Monsters.
Bookslut, http://www.bookslut.com/ (October 21, 2009), Adam Lipkin, review of Trampoline: An Anthology; (October 21, 2009), Colleen Mondor, review of Pretty Monsters.
Boston Globe Online, http://www.bostonglobe.com/ (February 7, 2015), Eugenia Williamson, review of Get in Trouble.
Chicago Tribune Online, http://www.chicagotribune.com/ (January 29, 2015), Amy Gentry, review of Get in Trouble.
Conceptual Fiction, http://www.conceptualfiction.com/ (March 1, 2015), Ted Gioia, review of Magic for Beginners.
Eve’s Alexandria, http://evesalexandria.typepad.com/ (October 21, 2009), “Magical Realism,” review of Magic for Beginners.
Fantasy, http://www.darkfantasy.org/ (October 21, 2009), Marguerute Croft, review of Pretty Monsters.
Foggy Foot Review, http://foggyfoot.blogspot.com/ (October 21, 2009), review of Pretty Monsters.
Hipsterbookclub, http://www.hipsterbookclub.com/ (October 21, 2009), Bri Lafond, review of Pretty Monsters.
Kelly Link Home Page, http://www.kellylink.net (March 1, 2015).
Los Angeles Times Online, http://www.latimes.com/ (February 1, 2015), David L. Ulin, review of Get in Trouble.
Millions, http://www.themillions.com/ (February 9, 2015), Hilary Lawlor, “Memory Is a Mysterious Machine: The Millions Interviews Kelly Link.”
New York Times Online, http://www.nytimes.com/ (January 28, 2015), “Kelly Link: By the Book.”
NPR.org, http://www.npr.org/ (February 3, 2015), Audie Cornish, “Drift Away into the Not-Quite-Dreamy Logic of Get in Trouble”; (February 10, 2015), Meg Wolitzer, “Ignoring the Rules, Kelly Link Traffics in Wonder, Irony and Teenage Longings.”
Salon.com, http://www.salon.com/books (October 21, 2009), Laura Miller, “Romance and Other Myths,” interview; Laura Miller, review of Stranger Things Happen; (February 4, 2015), Laura Miller, review of Get in Trouble.
Strange Horizons, http://www.strangehorizons.com/ (October 21, 2009), Chris Barzak, “Witnessing Magic: Kelly Link’s Stranger Things Happen”; Lynne Jamneck, “20 Questions with Kelly Link.”
Time Out Chicago, http://chicago.timeout.com/ (October 21, 2009), Jonathan Messinger, review of Pretty Monsters.
Venus, http://venuszine.com/ (October 21, 2009), Melissa Albert, review of Pretty Monsters.
Washington Post Online, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ (February 18, 2015), Michael Dirda, review of Get in Trouble.
About Kelly
Kelly Link is the author of the collections Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, Pretty Monsters, Get in Trouble, and White Cat, Black Dog. Her short stories have been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Best American Short Stories, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. She was a 2018 MacArthur Fellow and has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She and Gavin J. Grant have co-edited a number of anthologies, including multiple volumes of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and, for young adults, Steampunk! and Monstrous Affections. She is the co-founder of Small Beer Press and co-edits the occasional zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. She is the owner of Book Moon, an independent bookshop in Easthampton, MA.
Link was born in Miami, Florida. She currently lives with her family, dog, and chickens in Northampton, Massachusetts.
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Kelly Link
Kelly Link and Gavin Grant
Kelly Link and Gavin Grant
Born July 19, 1969 (age 55)
Miami, Florida, U.S.[1]
Occupation Writer
Education Columbia University (BA)
University of North Carolina, Greensboro (MFA)
Genre Fantasy, horror, magical realism
Spouse Gavin Grant
Children 1[2]
Kelly Link (born July 19, 1969) is an American editor and writer. Mainly known as an author of short stories, she published her first novel The Book of Love in 2024.[3][4] While some of her fiction falls more clearly within genre categories, many of her stories might be described as slipstream or magic realism: a combination of science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, and literary fiction. Among other honors, she has won a Hugo Award, three Nebula Awards, and a World Fantasy Award for her fiction, and she was one of the recipients of the 2018 MacArthur "Genius" Grant.[5]
Biography
Link is a graduate of Columbia University in New York and the MFA program of UNC Greensboro. In 1995, she attended the Clarion East Writing Workshop.
Link and husband Gavin Grant manage Small Beer Press, based in Northampton, Massachusetts. The couple's imprint of Small Beer Press for intermediate readers is called Big Mouth House. They also co-edited St. Martin's Press's The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror anthology series with Ellen Datlow for five years, ending in 2008. (The couple inherited the "fantasy" side from Terri Windling in 2004.) In 2019, Link and Grant opened Book Moon, a new and used bookstore in Easthampton, Massachusetts.[6] Link also co-edits the literary magazine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet,[7] and was the slush reader for Sci Fiction, edited by Datlow.
Link taught at Lenoir–Rhyne University in Hickory, North Carolina, with the Visiting Writers Series for spring semester 2006. She has taught or visited at a number of schools and workshops including:
Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York;
Brookdale Community College of Lincroft, New Jersey;
the Imagination Workshop at Cleveland State University;
New England Institute of Art & Communications, Brookline, Massachusetts;
Clarion East at Michigan State University, Lansing;
Clarion West in Seattle, Washington; and
Smith College, near her home in Northampton.
She has participated in the Juniper Summer Writing Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst's MFA Program for Poets & Writers.
Awards
2017: World Fantasy Award for contributions to the genre (nominee)
2018: MacArthur Fellowship[8]
2023: Honorary degree from Smith College.[9]
Bibliography
Books
Stranger Things Happen: 2001 Salon Book of the Year, The Village Voice favorite (available here [1] as a free download, under a Creative Commons license)
Magic for Beginners: 2006 Locus Award for Best Short Story Collection
Pretty Monsters: 2008 World Fantasy[10] and Locus Award finalist.
Get in Trouble: 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist.
White Cat, Black Dog: 2023 Kirkus Prize Finalist.
The Book of Love: 2024
Selected stories (award winners)
"The Game of Smash and Recovery": 2016 Theodore Sturgeon Award
"The Summer People": 2011 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novelette, 2013 The O. Henry Prize Stories
"Pretty Monsters": 2009 Locus Award for Best Novella
"Magic for Beginners": 2005 Nebula Award for Best Novella
"The Faery Handbag": 2005 Hugo and Nebula Award for Best Novelette, Locus Award winner
"Stone Animals": 2005 The Best American Short Stories
"Louise's Ghost": 2001 Nebula Award for Best Novelette
"The Specialist's Hat": 1999 World Fantasy Award
"Travels with the Snow Queen": 1997 James Tiptree, Jr. Award
As author
4 Stories (chapbook), Small Beer Press, 2000
Stranger Things Happen, Small Beer Press, 2001
Magic for Beginners, Small Beer Press, 2005 (reprinted by Harcourt, 2005)
Catskin: a swaddled zine, Jelly Ink Press, date unknown
Pretty Monsters: Stories, Viking Juvenile, 2008
The Wrong Grave, 2009
Get in Trouble: Stories, Random House, 2015
White Cat, Black Dog: Stories, Random House, 2023[11]
The Book of Love, Random House, 2024[12][13][14][15]
As editor
Trampoline Small Beer Press, 2003
The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror volume 17– (with Ellen Datlow and Gavin J. Grant) St. Martin's Press, 2004–2008
In addition, Link and Grant have edited a semiannual small press fantasy magazine: Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet (or LCRW) since 1997. An anthology, The Best of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, was published by Del Rey Books in 2007.
Biography
Kelly Link is the author of the collections Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, Pretty Monsters,Get in Trouble and Pulitzer Prize-finalist White Cat, Black Dog. Her short stories have been published in The Magazine of Fantasy Science Fiction, The Best American Short Stories, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. She is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow and has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She and Gavin J. Grant have co-edited a number of anthologies, including multiple volumes of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and for young adults, Steampunk! and Monstrous Affections. She is the co-founder of Small Beer Press and co-edits the occasional zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Her novel The Book of Love will be published by Random House in 2024.
Link was born in Miami, Florida. She owns the Easthampton independent bookstore Book Moon and currently lives with her husband and daughter, dog, and chickens in Northampton, Massachusetts.
A Conversation with Kelly Link, Short Story Award Guest Judge
January 5, 2024
We’re excited to kick off 2024 with this interview with Winter Short Story Award for New Writers guest judge Kelly Link. Link’s first novel (!) The Book of Love comes out in early February, and we are eager for its release. In the meantime, be sure to submit your own work to the 2023-2024 Winter Short Story Award for New Writers for the chance to win a $3,000 cash prize along with publication and agency review. Submissions close January 28!
Thank you so much for agreeing to judge our Winter Short Story Award for New Writers! We can’t overstate how much we admire work, and how exciting it is that you’ll once again be selecting the finalists for one of our contests. You previously judged a Fall Fiction Contest back in 2016, where you chose Ruth Joffre’s unforgettable “Night Beast,” which was later the titular story in her collection from Grove Atlantic.
Besides your writing, you co-run a small press, co-edit a literary zine, own and operate a bookstore and have also judged a number of contests over the years. Do you find that your selection process differs between these practices? How do your experiences in all these corners of the literary world inform your reading and evaluation?
Well, the sad news is that we’ve shut down Small Beer Press for the foreseeable future. My husband, who is the heart and soul and brains of the press has now been down with profound long covid for two years, and it just isn’t possible to keep doing the work that running a small press requires. But no, I don’t know that the process works differently when I read. I’m attempting to read with my full attention, to be willing to be surprised, entertained, troubled, delighted. I’m interested in what a particular writer can show me it’s possible to do in the short story format. I’m interested in what that writer is interested in.
As a judge, what kind of stories are you looking for?
I’m looking for stories that feel as if they matter to the person who wrote them, where I have the sensation that I’m in conversation not only with another person, but with all of the writers and various communities that they’re in conversation with. I’m looking for stories that make a promise on the first page, telling me what matters in that story. I’m looking for stories that understand something of the genres from which they’re drawing, that feel as if the writer is taking a big swing. The subject matter doesn’t have to be big, the stakes don’t have to be high, but I want to feel as if there’s something lively and outsized about the language, or the voice, or what it tells me about how we live in the world.
Rebecca Makkai once wrote for us that in her decisions for our anthology, she weighed the question of polish vs. promise, ultimately leaning toward “spark and promise” over all. Which camp are you a part of?
I’m in Makkai’s camp, here, though I often find that promise & polish go together. Which is to say, polish is often part of what makes someone’s voice their voice. What I’m leery of is the substitution of polish for risk taking. Sometimes a story with gorgeous sentences feels, nevertheless, like a good piece of taxidermy but without the strangeness.
I think I speak for everyone when I say we can’t wait for your novel to come out in February. What can you tell us about the book?
It’s quite long! It’s set in an imaginary small town off the coast of New England, where three high school students come back from the dead and find themselves up to their ears in various mysteries. It’s my love letter to the romance genre and The CW-style supernatural melodrama, and kids who start bands with their friends.
As you’ve been working on the novel, after so many years of writing short stories, did you find that your process was at all different? Did you come to this novel knowing it was a novel, or did that realization only come later? How did that affect the way you approached your drafts?
I knew from the start I was writing a novel, and that it would be told from many different points of views. Much as with short stories, I knew the broad outline of the larger story, and I knew most of how it ought to conclude. The hardest part was that once I’d hit around one hundred pages, I couldn’t begin each day at the beginning and revise to where I’d left off as I would with a short story. I had to keep moving forward. But once the book was more or less done, revision became enormously pleasurable. I have stacks and stacks of various versions of the novel in my office now.
What does your research process look like? This is something I don’t think writers talk about too often, but that I find fascinating. Everyone approaches research so differently, and at different stages in their writing process.
I read a fair amount of music theory and musician’s biographies for The Book of Love. I also tagged in a writer friend, Sarah Pinsker, to help me figure out what guitars my characters might be drawn to, and a librarian, Steve Ammidown, to get some of the details right about category romance. And last year my husband and I slowly drove down the coastline of Massachusetts to see if I wanted to make any changes to Lovesend, the nonexistent town I’d set the novel in. But, honestly, I don’t often need to do a lot of research. For my last collection, White Cat, Black Dog, research meant rereading various fairytales, and asking people who lived in Reykjavik if they’d mind looking at a story to make sure “Prince Hat Underground” didn’t stray too far from the real place in its details.
This year, we’re starting a new series in which we ask writers about their creative activities besides writing. What do you most enjoy doing when you’re not writing? How do those pursuits inform your writing, or otherwise make space for your writing? What changes for you when returning to the page after a period of not writing?
This is a great question. At various point in my life I’ve painted with watercolors, and made coil pots. I made jewelry for a while. Right now the work that I do at Book Moon feels creative. Not just the bookselling, though that does feel creative to me, but we get to make cards, design T-shirts, and so on. Teaching workshop, too, which I’m doing at the moment, is absolutely a form of creative work. We got chickens during the pandemic, and taking care of them feels restorative to me. Our dog, Koko, provides a lot of delight.
I’ve never been good at any kind of daily writing practice. I take long blocks of time away to focus on bookselling, or teaching, to do editorial work for Small Beer, etc. I don’t quite know how life and writing will change now that the Small Beer work isn’t there anymore. I have half of a middle grade novel, and a plan for a short ghost novel, and next year I aim to return to those. I don’t know what changes for me when I come back to writing after time away. But I do feel most fully and comfortably myself if I’m engaged in some kind of book work, whether it’s writing, teaching, editing, or bookselling.
Interviewed by Cole Meyer
previous
Flights of Fancy
Link's engagerr with the strange reaches its apotheosis in White Cat. Black Random House. Mar.: reviewed on p. 13), in which she draws tales including "1 lansel and Gretel" and White and Rose Red."
What's your relationship tales?
Like many people who loving fairy tales were my introd fantastic. They're a genre to, whether reading Angel anthologies of retold fairy tales. I think what seemed useful to me when I began to think about the kind of stories I wanted to write was that I could use fairy tales in a way that was not a direct retelling but could retain some of the extraordinary qualities of colors, food, or animals. I wrote "The Lady and the Fox," based on the Scottish ballad of "Tam Lin," for an exhibition, and thought I could keep finding ways to approach the collection from there.
The stories often feature familiar objects and places made strange, like a cross stitch bearing a sinister message and a marijuana dispensary run by a cat. Where did these details come from ?
That cross stitch doesn't exist, but it's probably connected to the popularity of folk horror and the really gorgeous, slightly gothic crafts people make now. I love art that is weird and personal, but connects to these esoteric things, whether you're making a cake or a piece of music. The eternal and the pop-cultural intersect.
What can contemporary fiction inject into the fairy tale?
Maybe psychological depth. Fairy tales depend on what the reader brings to them. The difference between fairy tales and myth is that Disney hardened our idea of certain stories so that a particular version of them becomes so codified that it replaces other possibilities of how that stoty could exist. I don't think it's great to let those stories exist in one form. People are constantly retelling them, and I think you need the rigid, popular version everyone knows for the weirder versions to have any power.
Did you set any rules for yourself while writing these stories? They had to be fairy tales where there was space to do something interesting. Fairy tales are a very fluid form; constants are the rule of three and a sense of justice or of consequences. It's a world where there are consequences for following the rules or breaking them, like whether you are polite to strangers. There's always this tension between the anarchic and the law-abiding. Rules matter, but everyone has someone or something they love so much that they will step out of the bounds of normal life and into the fantastic.
--JW MCCORMACK
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 PWxyz, LLC
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Mccormack, Jw. "PW TALKS WITH KELLY LINK." Publishers Weekly, vol. 270, no. 2, 9 Jan. 2023, p. 45. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A733607187/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7a1f706e. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
Byline: Anita Felicelli
White Cat, Black Dog
By Kelly Link
Random House. 260 pp. $27.
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Kelly Link is something of a short-story sorceress. The 2018 MacArthur fellow refuses rules, subverts conventions and, in so doing, delivers unpredictable adventure. "White Cat, Black Dog," her fifth collection, is a set of seven slipstream short stories that edge, in length, toward novelettes. Where her earlier collections were anchored by a zany, wondrous youthfulness (as well as vampires, faeries and other fantastical genre staples), this one seems to convey: Never fear, aging has entertaining horrors all its own.
Many of these bizarrely fractured fairy tales are based on obscure ones probably familiar only to devotees of illustrator Arthur Rackham's 19th-century color-based fairy tale collections, such as "The Blue Fairy Book." Yet Link's permutations retain palpable atmospheric similarities to their originals, marked by the same flatness of character and affect that characterize traditional fairy tales, as well as similarly bloody plots. Link intensifies her versions by making the stories wilder and setting them in mundane, contemporary situations.
Weird journeys, often featuring creepy companions, recur throughout the collection. The first story, "The White Cat's Divorce," is a quest narrative based on Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy's French fairy tale "The White Cat," about a king who tasks his three sons with finding the smallest and most beautiful dog to distract them from pursuing his throne. In d'Aulnoy's story, the youngest finds himself in a land of talking cats, ruled by a white cat who gives him an acorn to take back to the king. When the prince returns home, he breaks the acorn open to find, improbably, an enchantment, the smallest and most beautiful dog - but the king then sends him on another epic journey. It eventually resolves in a triple wedding. In Link's version, the premise is analogous: A rich man fears getting old and sees in his sons "the proof of his own mortality." But when the youngest son sets out, he does so in a roadster with a copy of Kerouac and dog treats, winding his way through a landscape of pot farms and airport security, until the story is darkened by violent betrayal.
The second story begins when one half of a gay couple, Prince Hat, disappears with a woman, evidently a lover from his past. When Prince Hat's partner, Gary, cannot locate him, a bartender suggests that perhaps Prince Hat has gone to hell, as he'd only come up to this world to gallivant and "see night become day become night again." When Gary heads out to find him, the story grows forbidding and a little kinky.
"The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear," about a lesbian on a flight home, takes a turn when a woman on the plane mistakes her for her wife, who had slept around many years before. Lest we imagine this will be a realistic narrative about erotic jealousy, the conversations take a peculiar, metaphoric turn when another passenger casually discusses the sighting of ghosts.
The last story, "Skinder's Veil," is the most overtly menacing, and it's also one of the greatest departures from its inspiration, "Snow-White and Rose-Red" by the Brothers Grimm. A young man must follow odd, intricate rules while housesitting, keeping careful track of which visitors are allowed to enter which entrances. Our hero is plagued by oddballs wanting to chitchat, but it's only after years pass that the elliptical mystery of the homeowner becomes clear.
Link leans on a signature technique she employs in other collections, too, like "Get in Trouble" and "Magic for Beginners": the placement of contemporary, niche objects inside plot structures that belong to fairy tales, such that an off-kilter, highly specific present is always in conversation with the lurid antique. A prince pulled into an Underworld sleeps on a blood-bed, not a water bed. A house sitter must reckon with a pair of crones - or are they maidens?
The atmosphere of these stories is uneasy, much like aging - you feel young, yet your body betrays a different reality. Like William Ely Hill's "My Wife and My Mother-in-Law," the well-known optical illusion featuring the same pair in a single image, the gestalt shifts and makes it impossible to settle on what, precisely, is in front of you.
- - -
Anita Felicelli is the author of the novel "Chimerica" and the short-story collection "Love Songs for a Lost Continent."
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 The Washington Post
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Felicelli, Anita. "Book World: Kelly Link wants to push us outside of our comfort zone." Washington Post, 17 Mar. 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A741691746/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6d3f7009. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
Link, Kelly WHITE CAT, BLACK DOG Random House (Fiction None) $27.00 3, 28 ISBN: 9780593449950
Seven modern fairy tales by a master of the short form.
Link, who won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2018, has been publishing groundbreaking fiction since her first collection, Stranger Things Happen, came out in 2001. Troubling old, stale boundaries between literary and genre fiction, writing stories that sometimes lean into horror, sometimes into fantasy, and that never shy away from featuring zombies, Link has produced a body of work that is formally original and emotionally rich. Her new collection of fairy tales is no exception. Part of the pleasure here is watching Link reimagine stories we think we know. That's the case in "The Game of Smash and Recovery," a futuristic SF tale based on "Hansel and Gretel," about a sister and brother living on an alien planet alongside vampires and Handmaids (creatures who are both vicious and ingenious) and waiting for their parents to return for them. Similarly, Link reworks "Snow-White and Rose-Red" into "Skinder's Veil," a story about a grad student hiding out in a borrowed cabin trying to finish his dissertation and being visited by two women named Rose White and Rose Red, who both sate and beguile him. Another pleasure is seeing Link update certain tropes. In her hands, the Grimms' enchanted animals are still enchanted animals, but straight princes and princesses are fabulous gay men and lesbian professionals, the ominous woods are airports with endless delays or post-apocalyptic landscapes where people must travel with corpses to keep monsters at bay, characters enter enchanted states by eating gummies, and true horror is a clogged toilet. Most beguiling are the ways these stories complicate the older tales' tidy conclusions: Is saving your lover from the Queen of Hell really noble if it means he will someday die from a disease? Is being feared by no one just as debilitating as fearing nothing? Is being brave worth the price? This is fiction that pulls you swiftly into its world and then holds you completely, lingering like an especially intense dream.
Enchanting, mesmerizing, brilliant work.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Link, Kelly: WHITE CAT, BLACK DOG." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A736805940/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c055f2a1. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
White Cat, Black Dog
by Kelly Link
Head of Zeus, [pounds sterling]20, pp 256
Kelly Link's latest collection of short stories riffs wildly on traditional fairy tales, filleting out their morphological structures and transposing them. She ranges from a space-set 'Hansel and Gretel' to a same-sex version of 'East of the Sun and West of the Moon', and much more besides. Like Angela Carter, Link understands the psychological (and narratological) powers of her raw material, and makes thrilling shapes while also dissecting modern society, our fears and our fantasies.
Each of these scintillating stories (not a dud among them) concerns lost characters in search of truth about themselves or the world. Sometimes they find it; more often they don't. Link's lucid prose moves the reader unerringly onwards through the forested thickets of her imagination. In 'The White Cat's Divorce' (based on 'The White Cat', a version of the 'Animal Bride' trope) an ageing bazillionaire finds his three growing sons an affront to his mortality, so he sends them off on impossible missions. The youngest wins all the tasks, with the aid of humanoid white cats who run a cannabis farm. He falls in love with their leader, the White Cat, who tells him that he must do everything she asks--including chopping off her head--at which point she transforms into a beautiful woman. So far, so fairy tale. But instead of having the White Cat marry the youngest of the brothers, Link renders her ending delightfully ambiguous, with not one but two surprises that leave the reader pondering the nature of feminism.
Two stories concern death: 'The White Road' achieves a creepiness worthy of Robert Aickman. The titular road appears; mysterious beings travel down it and tear humans apart; society collapses into a quasimedieval state. The invaders can be kept away by the presence of a corpse--which raises complicated questions about the provision of said corpses. I haven't read anything quite so terrifying (and oddly moving) in a while. The final story, 'Skinder's Veil', sees a disillusioned graduate student unwittingly house sitting for Death. There are moments of startling luminescence (as when two magnificent deer enter the house) as well as subtle fear. Mist rises from the ground, strange people and talking bears come and go, and the student must confront Death, and himself.
Link's writing has been gradually growing in power. White Cat, Black Dog marks a glittering new height in the literature of the weird. Don't come looking for happy ever afters.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
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Womack, Philip. "No happy endings." Spectator, vol. 351, no. 10153, 1 Apr. 2023, p. 34. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A745109120/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7052849a. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
White Cat, Black Dog: Stories
Kelly Link
Random House, 2023
There's something about starting out on the adventure of a new book by Kelly Link that feels like breathing out. This feeling doesn't come from entering into some form of escapism but more from a release of tension and a willing of myself into the space and place she creates with her mastery of the written form. If you don't already know her work, Link has published four previous story collections, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for one of them (Get in Trouble, 2016), and awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2018 for "pushing the boundaries of literary fiction in works that combine the surreal and fantastical with the concerns and emotional realism of contemporary life." I've never been a fan of the separations between "genre" fiction and "literary" fiction particularly as much that passes for "literary" is, quite honestly, less than. There's also much to be said for moving past tired forms of a specific type of "realism" into the boundless spaces available in "the surreal and fantastical."
Link's new collection contains stories that demand rereading with so many layers of meaning they move from brain into blood and bone and back again in a cyclical process. I did a first read late one sleepless night in my freezing NYC apartment, again on a long flight out to Seattle, and again holed up in a hotel room on the very rainy Olympic Peninsula. It would be easy to write about these stories as simply modernized fairy tales but I've never been one to take the easy path and they are more than that. Over almost three hundred pages, Link presents seven stories full of life and love, magic and death, and does it in sparkling prose. In a recent feature on Link, Shelley Jackson says, "[Link] has an internal compass that steers her infallibly toward strangeness ... It's true of her writing as well: There's always something held in reserve, some core that remains inexplicable." It's that inexplicable, perhaps ineffable, quality that keeps me coming back to tease out more details in each of these stories.
I've heard more than one reader compare Link's work with that other brilliant recreator of the fairy tale--Angela Carter--but that's as lazily unobservant as comparing Butler to LeGuin. I grew up on Carter's sharp-toothed tales and, arguably, those stories shaped my own feminism and how I see the world. But Carter and Link are different writers with different goals writing in very different times. So, while I read Link with the foundational experience of reading other writers in mind (Carter, Winterson, LeGuin), the experience of reading Link is more contemporary and often, somehow more disorienting. For example, in "The White Cat's Divorce," a rich man sends his three sons out on impossible quests in order to postpone his own death. The youngest son ends up lost in a snowstorm and pondering the nature of reality, "he began to feel ... as if he and his dogs were not living creatures at all but only small figures posed inside a snow globe." He's rescued by magical cats who are also successful marijuana cultivators and befriends a beautiful white cat. We learn that, as in Link's other stories, "Anything seemed in the realm of the possible here." Eventually the story plays out, with a shocking but great ending, and we're left with a piece of advice from the white cat, "If we let our fear of death stop us from what we wish most to do, then what is the point of living?"
This question folds neatly into the next tale, "Prince Hat Underground," a repositioning of "East of the Sun, West of the Moon," with Prince Hat and Gary as the parted lovers and a jazzercising woman named Agnes as the evil Queen of Hell who comes between them. Gary must travel to Hell to find Prince Hat and here Link draws in elements of Icelandic lore and a foundational choice between love and immortality. It's both darkly funny and artfully poignant. In "The White Road," the Musicians of Bremen are a group of traveling actors surviving in a post-apocalyptic world vaguely reminiscent of the troupe in Station Eleven. The opening sentence illustrates just how story can work for the teller and the reader, "All of this happened a very long time ago and so, I suppose, it has taken on the shape of a story, a made-up thing, rather than true things that happened to me and to those around me." It's never clear what the white road actually is but it brings monsters that can only be deterred by the presence of a corpse. When there are no corpses, bad things are bound to happen. It's a chillingly good read with the lesson, "One may be remarkable or not, but as a quality it has little bearing on whether or not one lives a long life. Or, for that matter, a happy life."
In "The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear," Abby, a married lesbian academic with an unspecified condition is stuck at the Detroit airport for four days. The nightmare of being lost in dark woods is replaced here by the monotonous nightmare of endless flight delays and antiseptic airport hotels. The rich description of Abby's daily swims in the hotel pool--and her dream that the pool is full of moonlight--add to the surreal texture of the tale. This is not reality as we know it. The story becomes ominous when the narrator tells us, "I do not do well in small space. I do not feel safe when I am far from home. I am not safe when I am far from home." And we soon learn that Abby isn't the only one who isn't safe when she's far from home.
The sci-fi tale "The Game of Smash and Recovery" is a strange take on "Hansel and Gretel" where Hansel is a presumably human boy (Oscar) left alone to take care of his increasingly non-human little sister (Anat). Told entirely from Anat's childlike point of view, it's only toward the end that we realize just who and what she actually is. In stark contrast is the more traditional fantasy-like rewrite of "Tam Lin." In this tale "The Lady and the Fox," Miranda is the daughter of Joannie, the former dresser and seamstress to famous actress Elspeth Honeywell. Joannie is imprisoned in Phuket with no hope of release for an unknown crime. Miranda is invited every year to celebrate Christmas at Honeywell Hall with the extended family--nearly all of them actors. The prose throughout this story is very rich, echoing the wealth of the family, the luxurious surroundings, the falling snow. One year Miranda sees a man in the garden standing outside in the snow, looking in. He wears antiquated clothing including a justaucorps (a sort of seventeeth-eighteenth century frock coat) with "a fox stitched in red and gold, its foreleg caught in a trap." While the story of Miranda and Fenny (the man in the snow) moves forward, there's a parallel coming-of-age story with each detail building to a marvelous ending.
In the final story, "Skinder's Veil," Snow-White and Rose-Red both feature as characters but their stories aren't central. Instead, this story stars Andy Sims, starting with "Once upon a time there was a graduate student in the summer of his fourth year who had not finished his dissertation." When Andy's friend Hannah asks him to do her a favor involving housesitting a remote home in the Vermont woods for a lot of money, of course Andy agrees. But, as his roommate's girlfriend Bronwen says, "Weird shit happens to everyone." And so it does to Andy throughout his stay in the house in the woods. His first clue should have been the framed cross-stitch on one bedroom wall that read, "West East Home is the Beast." While he spends time getting high (off edibles, the hallucinogenic well water, foraged mushrooms) and enjoying himself with Rose White, he works on his dissertation. One night after a particularly intense risotto, he comes to "the realization that Skinder's house has no walls, no roof, no foundation. The walls are trees, there is no ceiling, only sky." But despite any misgivings, Andy doesn't want the stay to end, "It was like being inside an enchantment. Why would he want to break the spell?" By the end of the story, Andy has moved on through his life until late one night, lost in the Vermont woods, he makes an important discovery that, rather than breaking the spell, brings it full circle. Like Andy, I didn't want the spell to end and so, I will continue rereading this collection, discovering different details, different layers through each read. This is a truly well-wrought and magical work, rather than simple updates of fairy tales or fables, these stories have a chilling core and deep observations on modern life that we can all learn from.
Yvonne C. Garrett holds an MLIS, an MFA-Fiction, two MAs (NYU), and a Ph.D. with a dissertation focused on women in Punk.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 The Brooklyn Rail, Inc.
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Garrett, Yvonne C. "Kelly Link's: White Cat, Black Dog." The Brooklyn Rail, Apr. 2023, p. 91. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A745656808/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0ca863b8. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
In ''The Book of Love,'' the Pulitzer finalist and master of short stories pushes our understanding of what a fantasy novel can be.
THE BOOK OF LOVE, by Kelly Link
A certain weight of expectation accrues on writers of short fiction who haven't produced a novel, as if the short story were merely the larval stage of longer work. No matter how celebrated the author and her stories, how garlanded with prizes and grants, the sense persists: She will eventually graduate from the short form to the long. After an adolescence spent munching milkweed in increments of 10,000 words or less, she will come to her senses and build the chrysalis required for a novel to emerge, winged and tender, from within.
Now Kelly Link -- an editor and publisher, a recipient of a MacArthur ''genius grant'' and the author of five story collections, one of which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist -- has produced a novel. Seven years in the making, ''The Book of Love'' -- long, but never boring -- enacts a transformation of a different kind: It is our world that must expand to accommodate it, we who must evolve our understanding of what a fantasy novel can be.
Reviewing ''The Book of Love'' feels like trying to describe a dream. It's profoundly beautiful, provokes intense emotion, offers up what feel like rooted, incontrovertible truths -- but as soon as one tries to repeat them, all that's left are shapes and textures, the faint outlines of shifting terrain.
Still, here goes: Set in 2014, in a small Massachusetts town called Lovesend, ''The Book of Love'' is the story of three local teenagers (and one stowaway) who return from the dead and must compete for the prize of remaining alive by completing a series of magical tasks.
It's the story of the parents, siblings and lovers of those teenagers, the people who mourned them for the year they were gone and now, magically, have had those memories of grief replaced: The teens were never dead, they were only studying abroad.
It's the story of the wizard-priests who guard either side of the door to the world of the dead; one of them is the teens' high school music teacher, who must now instruct them in magic if they're to survive.
It's the story of a fey, cruel moon goddess who's lost the key to her larder of souls, and the young man, now hundreds of years old, who bound himself to her service in exchange for a promise of revenge.
It's the story of two sisters, one of whom is part of the undead trio, who can't speak without hurting or irritating each other, but who also need each other, are lost without each other.
''The Book of Love'' is made up of smaller books: Each character perspective is presented as ''The Book of [character name],'' with surprising detours into the interiority of objects or concepts. This might suggest discrete accounts with clear divisions between them, but the reality is more complex: These books are in conversation with one another, their lives interleaved.
Susanna and Laura Hand, the sisters, are in a band with Daniel Knowe, who's been secretly dating Susanna but is opaquely detested by Mo Gorch, who is close friends with the girl Laura has a deep crush on -- the girl Susanna kissed out of spite. They've all known one another since childhood, and they're all on the cusp of adulthood. Tugging the story forward through these relationships are the questions of how Laura, Daniel and Mo died, why they came back, who or what slipped out of death alongside them, and what they all have to do to stay on this side of the grave.
It's common to read a book with a strong sense of place and say that the setting is a character in the story. But in ''The Book of Love,'' it's more correct to say that characters provide the story's setting: Each ''Book'' is a dwelling place to experience a life, and taken together, the result is immense. As C.S. Lewis wrote of heaven and John Crowley wrote of fairyland, the further in you go, the bigger it gets -- an experience that recalls the process of getting to know a person.
So much of Link's work steps lightly, a tempering of the commonplace with vivid, delicate surprise. In a 2023 profile for Vulture, Link observed: ''The novel hardens as you go on. ... At a certain point the ambitions, even the shape, begin to feel inevitable. The short story stays fluid.'' I kept waiting for the novel to harden as it went on, but it never did; every sentence remained a springboard for new sound, piano keys rising and falling in new variations. In one chapter, a man summons his lover by playing wrong notes in an old song; Link's project here sometimes feels like that, resisting an expected shape by leaning out of resolving cadences and into bumps, splinters, question marks.
''Don't be ashamed of the things that you unabashedly love in narrative,'' Link said in a 2019 speech. ''Investigate them with a loving heart.'' Investigating romance novels, small towns, families, the friends and music you make in high school, fairy villains and fairy lovers, with fascinated tenderness and deep familiarity, ''The Book of Love'' does justice to its name. Its composition, its copiousness, suggests that love, in the end, contains all -- that frustration, rage, vulnerability, loss and grief are love's constituent parts, bound by and into it.
THE BOOK OF LOVE | By Kelly Link | Random House | 628 pp. | $31
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Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The New York Times Company
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El-Mohtar, Amal. "Undead and Company." The New York Times Book Review, 17 Mar. 2024, p. 9. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A786649793/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=288fb8ff. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
Kelly Link
The Book of Love
Random House, 2024
I'm not quite sure what I was expecting when I read that Kelly Link's first novel (after many stunningly good short story collections) would be called The Book of Love. I thought maybe a sharp, lovely, brief book about wild magic and love and life. While this is a sharp and lovely book about all those things, it's also a terrifying contemplation on grief and loss and death and power. If you don't know Kelly Link, she's been a Pulitzer finalist, a MacArthur Fellow, and, as Neil Gaiman says, "puts one word after another and makes real magic with them--funny, moving, tender, brave and dangerous." The MacArthur Foundation states she pushes "the boundaries of literary fiction in works that draw [on] ... fantasy, science fiction, and horror while also engaging fully with the concerns and emotional realism of contemporary life." All of these things are true, but there are already complaints in reading-land that this novel is too long or somehow not what is wanted. Yes, it is long, but never once did I feel I was reading a six-hundred-page novel-even my sharp editorial brain found very few moments where I felt any lag. In a recent visit with a friend whose child is an avid reader of a certain age, I noticed they had a book with them--at least five inches thick--and kept it close like a beloved. So, if you think this novel is too long, perhaps it's really for those young ones who need a book to carry around like a shield, a book where they can find themselves in the characters. And these characters shine--fully embodied in their brittle young queerness, their jealousies and insecurities, their grief and lust and sadness.
The story is told in alternating points of view in alternating chapters titled in biblical fashion: "The Book of Susannah," "The Book of Laura," "The Book of Mo," and so on. At times I was frustrated by breaks in forward motion, but ultimately the structure helps create a complex narrative of people trying to survive in the midst of a deadly struggle. The book opens with Susannah Hand waking up in her sister Laura's bed in the small New England town of Lovesend. Laura has been missing for almost a year along with Susannah's sometimes-boyfriend Daniel and friend, Mo. Susannah rages against her missing, better-loved sister Laura, smashing an acoustic guitar--a gift from their missing father. The book is full of the missing and the dead, and the shape of grief that so many of the character's live with gives the novel some of its heft.
In the next chapter, Laura wakes up in a music classroom with Daniel Knowe, Mohammed "Mo" Gorch, and a fourth mysterious person. Laura "up until a year ago [was] quite sure of her place in the world." But now she is barefoot, covered in dirt, and confused. The three friends learn that the music teacher, Mr. Anabin, has brought them back from death. Mo, young, Black, orphaned, and queer, is the grandson of Caitlynn Hightower, a successful romance novelist who loves happy endings. She's also a Black woman who's made her mark on Lovesend, including by building statues of Black women throughout town. (Aside: there are some very well-wrought plot lines focused on race and gender and power that serve well as critiques of American whiteness.)
As the four formerly-dead stand in the music classroom, they witness a deal made between Mr. Anabin and an entity known as Bogomil: "two return, two remain" and "there will be three trials." Anabin creates a false memory for everyone in their lives--no one will remember they were dead. Of course, life has moved on without them: Mo's beloved grandmother is dead, and through him we experience the simple reality of loss: "Everywhere he looked, his grandmother wasn't. And she never would be again." Daniel's beloved younger siblings are older, and Susannah and her mother Ruth may not remember Laura's death, but they still feel an unnamed loss.
Each chapter reveals more about the character's lives and introduces terrifying adversaries (including an impressively murderous goddess) but there is also the underlying theme of love in all its forms--family, friendship, lust, and the sacrifices that' must be made for love. Of course, "There are many kinds of love, and not all of them are built to last" but the battle between love and power is at the core of the novel--not simply good versus evil but a more subtle focus on what each character will choose when the full truth of the deal they've made is revealed. Mo rages at one point, "What's the point of magic if you can't use it to make the world a better place?" and there are moments where Mo does try to make things better. But magic isn't like that, and life isn't a romance novel--you don't often get a happy ending. As Mo's grandmother says, "In real life ... happiness is a room.... If we're lucky we stumble through its doors every now and then." But perhaps we can take heart in Mo's grandmother's final words: "Love goes on even when we cannot." This is a heartbreaking, funny, terrifying, violent, beautiful novel about life and death, love and loss, and the magic and music at the heart of everything human.
Yvonne C. Garrett (she/her) holds an MLIS, an MFA-Fiction, two MAs (NYU), a Ph.D. (with a dissertation focused on women in Punk), and is currently pursuing an M.Div. (Chaplaincy). Senior Fiction Editor at Black Lawrence Press, she also curates the small press newsletter Sapling. She can be found online at theprb.substack.com and on X (Twitter) @yvonnePRB.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The Brooklyn Rail, Inc.
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Garrett, Yvonne C. "Kelly Link's The Book of Love." The Brooklyn Rail, Mar. 2024, p. 111. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A786813812/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9b153496. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
The Book of Love
by Kelly Link
Head of Zeus, [pounds sterling]22, pp. 628
Kelly Link's short-story collections bewilder and delight with their sideways takes on fantasy tropes. People might turn into cats, but they do it while texting emojis (dancing lady, unicorn, happy face). In The Book of Love, Link's debut novel, she revels in upholding and upturning the genre's conventions. Mainlining Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and with a dose of recent teen Netflix fantasies such as Locke & Key, her setting is a small coastal town in Massachusetts to which three sarky adolescents have suddenly returned home - although not, as is generally supposed, from a short trip to Ireland, but from what they, alongside assorted supernatural beings, know to be Death itself.
Crossing back over Death's threshold is the mark of a hero, and the trio exhibit miraculous abilities, can change the weather, transform into animals and even have sex in a magically created pavilion. Mohammed is the lonely gay, hooking up on apps and writing operas; Daniel is the stubborn eldest brother of a gang of siblings; and Laura, a keen singersongwriter, dreams of stardom and feuds with her annoying sister. It's these relationships, rooted in the messy reality of families and work, coffee shops and pizza, which provide a solid emotional centre to the novel. The three bicker, fall in love and lust, and battle the threatening forces arrayed against them.
As in Alan Garner's superlative The Owl Service, the triumvirate have become locked into a magical pattern which must be reenacted before disaster overwhelms them. Their supernatural counterparts are three ancient beings who control doors between worlds: they're in town and, boy, are they causing trouble.
The plot is not the most interesting thing here. Those attuned to the mechanics of fantasy will guess what's coming. Link, used to the short-story form, has overstretched a good idea and the latter parts of this long novel are on the thin side. She also highlights her politics in a way that seems crowbarred into the narrative. Yet the writing sparkles with wit and colour, and there is much camp weirdness and shimmering grandeur. Thousands of moths descend on the town; statues come to life; a hotel owner becomes a tiger, and there's even a pink flying unicorn 'in a snit'. This is entertaining fantasy and also, in its own way, experimental. Dancing lady, unicorn, happy face.
Philip Womack
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
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Womack, Philip. "Magical mystery tour." Spectator, vol. 355, no. 10195, 3 Feb. 2024, pp. 35+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A787691270/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c2b9680a. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
Link, Kelly THE BOOK OF LOVE Random House (Fiction None) $31.00 2, 13 ISBN: 9780812996586
A master of short fantasy offers her long-anticipated first novel.
Link has a genius for combining the mundane with the uncanny, diving into the dark currents where dreams grow and bringing up magic-encrusted jetsam, pearlescent ideas that coil and shock. The story takes place in a coastal New England town with the beautifully ambiguous, typically Link name of Lovesend. (Love's end? Love send?) There, four teenagers--sisters Susannah and Laura, their bandmate Daniel, and Susannah's friend Mo--are caught up in a struggle with deities who control access to death. As the book opens, Laura, Daniel, and Mo have been dead for months; in her grief, Susannah smashes her sister's guitar. Soon, the teens, along with a mysterious companion, return from the dead, reanimated by their high school music teacher, Mr. Anabin. Another supernatural person, Bogomil, appears, taking various human and animal forms (a wolf, a rabbit). He writes a message on the music classroom blackboard with his fingernail: "2 RETURN 2 REMAIN." Mr. Anabin gives the revenants a series of tasks, which they believe will allow two of them to stay alive while the other two, they presume, will die again. As they perform the tasks, readers get to know their families and personal struggles: Laura and Susannah's father left the family when they were little, and the two contend with sibling rivalry and family roles (Laura's the good girl, Susannah's the rebel); Daniel, who has a compulsion to be liked, is a loving, caretaking big brother to a gaggle of mixed-race siblings; Mo, a gay orphan and one of the few Black kids in town, has lost his beloved grandmother while he was dead. Meanwhile, increasingly dramatic magical events transform their hometown--the weather goes hot and cold, carousel horses turn into wolves, the goddess of the moon erects a temple in the middle of the bay--as the characters rush endlessly back and forth, arriving at last at an almost mechanically tidy ending. Although all the fabulous Link elements are here, at more than 600 pages, the story is unwieldy and overexplained.
This book has many enchantments and moving moments, but it would have been better, and more magical, if it were shorter.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Link, Kelly: THE BOOK OF LOVE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A774415156/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e4ea409a. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.