Get in Trouble

Nine stories that refuse to sit still. In one, a teenage girl receives a life-size boyfriend doll at a slumber party. In another, two women reunite in a hurricane while a superhero convention unfolds nearby. In a third, a pocket universe holds secrets about a girl who disappeared. Kelly Link writes fiction where the ordinary and the impossible coexist without explanation, and Get in Trouble is her most refined collection.

Why Start Here

This is the ideal entry point into slipstream because Link does something that defines the genre at its best: she never tells you where the rules end. Her stories begin in recognizable places, suburban houses, summer camps, bad parties, and then the ground shifts. A ghost shows up and nobody panics. A fairy tale intrudes on modern life and nobody comments. The strangeness is not the point of the story. It is the atmosphere the story breathes.

Link is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and one of the most celebrated short fiction writers working today. Get in Trouble showcases her ability to blend humor, heartbreak, and the genuinely weird into something that feels entirely natural. The stories are accessible enough for readers who have never encountered slipstream, but strange enough to rewire your expectations of what fiction can do.

As a short story collection, it also lets you sample the slipstream sensibility in small doses rather than committing to a full novel.

What to Expect

Smart, funny, deeply strange short stories that mix domestic realism with fairy tale logic. Each story creates its own private world with its own private rules. The prose is playful and precise. You will occasionally stop reading to ask yourself what just happened, and that feeling is the entire point.