Stranger Things Happen: Stories - Softcover

Link, Kelly

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1931520003 ISBN 13: 9781931520003

Publisher: Small Beer Press, 2001

Synopsis

“An alchemical mix of Borges, Raymond Chandler and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”—Salon.com (Best of the Year)

“A delightful collection.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer

“My favorite fantasy writer.”—Alan Cheuse, All Things Considered

"Link's stories defy explanation, or at least, brief summary, instead working on the plane between dream and cognitive dissonance. They are true to themselves: witty, beautiful, funny, and startling."—Rain Taxi

"Link uses the nonsensical to illuminate truth, blurring the distinctions between the mundane and the fantastic to tease out the underlying meanings of modern life."—Booklist

"The 11 fantasies in this first collection from rising star Link are so quirky and exuberantly imagined that one is easily distracted from their surprisingly serious underpinnings of private pain and emotional estrangement."
—Publishers Weekly

Kelly Link's collection of stories, Stranger Things Happen, really scores.
—Daniel Mendelsohn, New York Magazine

"A tremendously appealing book, and lovers of short fiction should fall over themselves getting out the door to find a copy."
—Washington Post Book World

"Stylistic pyrotechnics light up a bizarre but emotionally truthful landscape. Link's a writer to watch."
—Kirkus Reviews

"A set of stories that are by turns dazzling, funny, scary, and sexy, but only when they're not all of these at once. Kelly Link has strangeness, charm and spin to spare. Writers better than this don't happen."
—Karen Joy Fowler

"Kelly Link is probably the best short story writer currently out there, in any genre or none. She puts one word after another and makes real magic with them-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

"Kelly Link is the exact best and strangest and funniest short story writer on earth that you have never heard of at the exact moment you are reading these words and making them slightly inexact. Now pay for the book."
—Jonathan Lethem

The eleven stories in Kelly Link’s debut collection are funny, spooky, and smart. They all have happy endings. They were all especially written for you. A Best of the Year pick from Salon.com, Locus, The Village Voice, and San Francisco Chronicle. Includes Nebula, World Fantasy, and Tiptree award-winning stories.

Kelly Link is the author of three collections of short fiction Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, and Pretty Monsters. Her short stories have won three Nebula, a Hugo, and a World Fantasy Award. She was born in Miami, Florida, and once won a free trip around the world by answering the question “Why do you want to go through the world?” (”Because you can’t go through it.”)

Link lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she and her husband, Gavin J. Grant, run Small Beer Press, co-edit the fantasy half of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and play ping-pong. In 1996 they startd the occasional zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

Kelly Link has been called “the most impressive writer of her generation” by Peter Straub and “a national treasure” by Neil Gaiman. Publications from Time to the Village Voice, from Locus to Salon, have lauded her as wildly talented and widely influential. In 2001, Link caused the literary world to catch its breath with Stranger Things Happen, one of the first great single-author collections of the new century. When it debuted, the book broke new ground in fantastic literature, and still reads as fresh, provocative, and dazzlingly original.These stories are strange, quirky, smart—and like no others. In “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose,” a dead man sends letters to his living wife. In “The Specialist's Hat,” the rhymes and games of two children and their babysitter come to define, but not explain, a uniquely haunted house. In “The Girl Detective,” the case of the tap-dancing bank robbers means a trip to the underworld. Among the eleven stories gathered here, readers will find dictators and extraterrestrials, an apocalyptic beauty pageant and two women named Louise.Stories from Stranger Things Happen won Nebula, World Fantasy, and Tiptree Awards, and the volume garnered widespread acclaim. Link continues to earn accolades and find new readers with each story she publishes. In this special limited edition, revisit the collection that has already become a classic.This special signed limited edition of Stranger Things Happen is accompanied by a separate collection, Origin Stories, which contains over 20,000 words of never-before-collected fiction.

About the Author:

Kelly Link is the author of two collections, Magic for Beginners (chosen as a 2005 Best Book by Time Magazine, Salon.com, and Book Sense) and Stranger Things Happen. She is the editor of the anthology Trampoline. She and her husband Gavin J. Grant started Small Beer Press in 2000.

About this edition

• Publisher: Small Beer Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1931520003
• ISBN 13: 9781931520003
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 280