Where to Start with Kelly Link
Kelly Link writes short fiction that exists in the gap between literary realism and the genuinely uncanny. Her stories begin in familiar places, houses, parties, summer camps, and then veer into territory that no one can quite name. Ghosts appear without fanfare. Fairy tale logic takes over without warning. The real and the impossible coexist as though they have always been neighbors. She is a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a MacArthur Fellow, and one of the most influential short story writers of her generation, equally claimed by the literary mainstream and the speculative fiction community.
Start here
Get in Trouble
Kelly Link · 352 pages · 2015 · Moderate
Themes: the uncanny, fairy tales, identity, love, transformation
Get in Trouble is Link’s third story collection and the one that brought her to the widest audience, earning a Pulitzer Prize nomination and cementing her reputation as one of the most original voices in American fiction. The nine stories here range from a slumber party disrupted by a life-size boyfriend doll to a woman haunted by pocket universes to two old friends reuniting during a hurricane near a superhero convention.
Why Start Here
This is Link’s most polished and accessible collection. Her earlier books, Stranger Things Happen and Magic for Beginners, are brilliant but sometimes willfully obscure. Get in Trouble keeps all the strangeness while adding emotional clarity. You always know what the characters want and what they stand to lose, even when the world around them has gone sideways.
The collection also represents the full range of what Link can do. Some stories lean toward horror. Others are closer to fairy tales. A few read like science fiction filtered through a dream. But they all share a voice that is warm, funny, and slightly unsettling, like a friend who tells you a story and you realize halfway through that it is not quite the kind of story you thought it was.
What to Expect
Nine short stories, each building its own strange world. The prose is precise and playful. The humor is dry. The emotional stakes are real even when the situations are impossible. A good collection to read one story at a time, giving each room to settle before moving to the next.