Stranger Things Happen - Hardcover

Kelly Link

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1596065214 ISBN 13: 9781596065215

Publisher: Subterranean, 2012

Synopsis

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 this title

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.

From Publishers Weekly:

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. In "Water Off a Black Dog's Back," a na‹ve young man who has never known personal loss finds that the only way he can curry favor with his lover's physically afflicted family is to suffer a bizarre amputation. The protagonist in "Travels with the Snow Queen" reconsiders her fairy-tale romance when she deconstructs the clich‚s of traditional fairy tales and realizes that their heroines inevitably sacrifice and suffer much more than their heroes do. Link favors impersonal and potentially off-putting postmodern narrative approaches, but draws readers to the emotional core of her stories through vulnerable but brave characters who cope gamely with all the strangeness the world can throw their way. In the book's most effective tale, "Vanishing Act," a young girl's efforts to magically reunite herself with her distant family by withdrawing from the world around her poignantly calls attention to the spiritual vacancies and absence of affection in the family she stays with. "The Specialist's Hat" features twin sisters whose morbid obsessions seems due as much to their father's parental neglect as their mother's death. Although a few of the selections seem little more than awkward freshman exercises in the absurd, the best shed a warm, weird light on their worlds, illuminating fresh perspectives and fantastic possibilities.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Subterranean
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1596065214
• ISBN 13: 9781596065215
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 232
• Illustrator: Kathleen Jennings