Get in Trouble: Stories Hardback - 2015

Media reviews

Advance praise for Get in Trouble
 
“Kelly Link is inimitable. Her stories are like nothing else, dark yet sparkling with her unique brand of fairy dust, wonderfully strange but still familiar and real. Get in Trouble is filled with pocket universes, each tale containing so much more than its length might suggest and crackling with the unexpected: the most marvelous kind of trouble to get in.”—Erin Morgenstern
 
“Kelly Link is one of my all-time favorite writers, and the fact that she’s living and is still getting better? By God, that’s a small club. She is unique. You know who else would love her? Kafka and Lewis Carroll. Like them, she knows things the rest of us don’t. But she also knows things we all know: what it feels like to be in love, to want to be in love, to be alone, to want to be alone, to be disappointed in people, to try again. She makes those old heartbreaks glow with strange new lights.”—Arthur Phillips
 
“With Get in Trouble, Kelly Link continues to prove just how much of a literary tightrope walker she really is. Her prose is conveyed in details so startling and fine that each one is like a firework in the brain. You work up a sweat just waiting for the next sentence to land. This is why we read, crave, need, can’t live without short stories.”—Téa Obreht
 
“Link’s stories are always a treat, and Get in Trouble contains some of her best writing yet. Richly imagined, intellectually teasing: These are not so much small fictions as windows onto entire worlds. This is a brilliant, giddying read.”—Sarah Waters
 
“In this utterly astonishing new collection, Kelly Link demonstrates a perfect and completely mature command of the entirely unexpected, ever-evolving, self-examining, deeply original, emotion-riddled kind of story onlyshe is capable of writing. Another way to say this is: In these stories, Kelly Link is at the top of her self-defined form. Another way to say it is: Close your mouth and get out of the way, because here comes Kelly Link, than whom no one is better.”—Peter Straub
 
“Every one of the stories in this collection is like a one-of-a-kind jack-in-the-box. We turn the crank, expecting the laughter, the surprise, the rearrangement of themes familiar to our ears from ages ago, and the turning brings us all those joys. But wait, wait until the box pops open: out comes not Jack nor the weasel but our own exposed hearts. How does Kelly Link understand our pains and longings and memories and even our futures so well, and how does she make us go back to the next jack-in-the-box, again and again, with hope and dread and determination to know life better, to live differently? Kelly Link is a national treasure!”—Yiyun Li