Three Reasons to Get in Trouble (Get in Trouble: Stories by Kelly Link)

Here are three reasons you’ll love the fantastical, mashed-up stories in Kelly Link’s new book Get in Trouble (Random House 2015):

1) You love stories that feature, but aren’t limited to, spaceships, ghosts, monsters, fairies, Internet cat-fishing, alternate dimensions, superheroes, not-so-super heroes, MMORPGs, possessed android dolls, world-wide sleep diseases, natural disasters, unnatural disasters, butter sculptures.

2) You love the kinds of stories that give you the heebie-jeebies, the jim-jams, the howling fantods, but you also love stories that lean heavily into emotional realism, that treat characters not as vehicles for plot advancement or whimsy delivery, but with full-fledged interest and generosity.

3) You love laughing and sadness and wonder and that shiver of delight that attends a perfect sentence and you love even more literary fiction that loves genre writing and pop culture, but that knows how to make these things sizzle and live by challenging the stereotypes that lurk beneath the surface.

Kelly Link, Get in Trouble: Stories. Published by Random House (2015). 352 pages.