Stranger Things Happen: Stories
New edition with 16 interior illustrations by Wesley Allsbrook.
This first collection by award-winning author Kelly Link takes fairy tales and cautionary tales, dictators and extraterrestrials, amnesiacs and honeymooners, revenants and readers alike, on a voyage into new, strange, and wonderful territory. The girl detective must go to the underworld to solve the case of the tap-dancing bank robbers. A librarian falls in love with a girl whose father collects artificial noses. A dead man posts letters home to his estranged wife. Two women named Louise begin a series of consecutive love affairs with a string of cellists. A newly married couple become participants in an apocalyptic beauty pageant. Sexy blond aliens invade New York City. A young girl learns how to make herself disappear.
These eleven extraordinary stories are quirky, spooky, and smart. They all have happy endings. Every story contains a secret prize. Each story was written especially for you.
Stories from Stranger Things Happen have won the Nebula, Tiptree, and World Fantasy Award. Stranger Things Happen was a Salon Book of the Year, one of the Village Voice's 25 Favorite Books, and was a Firecracker Award finalist.
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"Pity the poor librarians who have to slap a sticker on Kelly Link's genre-bending, mind-blowing masterpiece of the imagination, Stranger Things Happen."
-Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia, for NPR's You Must Read This"My favorite fantasy writer, Miss Kelly Link"
--Alan Cheuse, NPR, All Things Considered"Kelly Link's collection of stories, Stranger Things Happen, really scores."
-- Daniel Mendelsohn, New York Magazine"Stranger Things Happen is 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"I love that book! Her imagination goes beyond any known boundaries. She is like Magritte: the eye, the regard, 'behind every visible object lies another object, an invisible one.'"
-- Angéeacute;lica Gorodischer"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, author of The Jane Austen Book Club"Link's writing is gorgeous, mischievous, sexy and unsettling. Unexpected images burst on your brain like soap bubbles on a dog's tongue. I've been trying to imitate her since I first read one of her stories. It's impossible. Instead I find myself curling up with a satisfied sigh and enjoying once more."
-- Nalo Hopkinson, author of Midnight Robber"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, author of Motherless Brooklyn"If Kelly Link is not the "future of horror," a ridiculous phrase, she ought to be. To have a future at all, horror in general, by which I might as well mean fiction in general, requires precisely her freshness, courage, intelligence, and resistance to received forms and values. Kelly Link seems always to speak from a deep, deeply personal, and unexpected standpoint. Story by story, she is creating new worlds, new frameworks for perception, right in front of our eyes. I think she is the most impressive writer of her generation."
-- Peter Straub, author of Magic Terror"I've been impatiently awaiting a collection of Kelly Link's stories. Now that it's here, it will sit in my library on that very short shelf of books I read again and again. For those who think Fantasy tired, Stranger Things Happen is a wake-up call."
-- Jeffrey Ford"Finally, Kelly Link's wonderful stories have been collected. My only complaint is the brevity of her oeuvre to date; as an avid reader of her work, I want her to continue to create more gems for me to read. I predict that "The Specialist's Hat," winner of the World Fantasy Award, will become part of the canon of classic supernatural tales."
-- Ellen Datlow"Kelly Link is a brilliant writer. Her stories seem to come right out of your own dreams, the nice ones and the nightmares both. These stories will burrow right into your subconscious and stay with you forever."
-- Tim Powers, author of On Stranger Tides"Of all the books you'll read this year, this is the one you'll remember. Kelly Link's stories are like gorgeous ta
