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Kelly Link

(b.1969)

Kelly Link's story "Travels with the Snow Queen" won the James Tiptree Jr. Award in 1997. Her story "The Specialist's Hat" won the World Fantasy Award in 1999. She received her BA from Columbia University and her MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She once won a free trip around the world. She co-edits the zine Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. She currently lives in Brooklyn. Stranger Things Happen is her first collection of stories.

Genres: Horror, Young Adult Fantasy, Fantasy, Literary Fiction, Science Fiction

New and upcoming books

February 2024

The Book of Love

Series

Ghosts of the Shadow Market
4. Learn About Loss (2018) (with Cassandra Clare)

Novels

The Book of Love (2024)

Collections

   Stranger Things Happen (2001)
   Magic for Beginners (2005)
   Pretty Monsters (2008)
   Get in Trouble (2014)
   White Cat, Black Dog (2023)

Novellas and Short Stories

Stone Animals (2015)
The Summer People (2015)

Anthologies edited

   Trampoline (2003)
   The Best of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet (2007) (with Gavin J Grant)
   Steampunk! (2011) (with Gavin J Grant)
   Monstrous Affections (2014) (with Gavin J Grant)

Anthology series

Year's Best Fantasy and Horror (with Ellen Datlow and Gavin J Grant)
   17. The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 17th Annual Collection (2004)
   18. The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 18th Annual Collection (2005)
   19. The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 19th Annual Collection (2006)
   20. The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 20th Annual Collection (2007)
   21. The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 21st Annual Collection (2008)

Series contributed to

Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy
Shadowhunters Short Story Paperback Collection (2020) (with others)

Kelly Link recommends

Ghostroots (2024)
'Pemi Aguda
"A marvelously unsettling collection where the everyday strangeness of life and the uncanny rub up against each other."

The Sleepwalkers (2024)
Scarlett Thomas
"A fabulously sly and slippery tale of a honeymoon that goes from bad to worse to even worse yet. Vivid, scalpel-sharp, and impossible to put down."

Grey Dog (2024)
Elliott Gish
"Elliott Gish has produced a ripe, exquisitely rendered gothic in which wildernesses, both interior and natural, are dangerous, seductive, and bloody spaces. Ada Byrd is an iconic character, equal to Carmilla or Eleanor Vance."

The Garden (2024)
Clare Beams
"The Garden renders beautifully the uncanny, haunted space that pregnancy both occupies and creates. Beams's glancing, needle-prick prose reminds me of Shirley Jackson's work in its ability to conjure up women--their histories, their fears, the complexity of their desires, and their power. I loved this novel."

Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart (2024)
GennaRose Nethercott
"Real magic, real delight, doled out generously in the shape of wistful, ferocious, this-world-but-better stories."

Sword Catcher (2023)
(Chronicles of Castellane, book 1)
Cassandra Clare
"A sumptuous feast of a book, vivid and delicious and heady. Cassandra Clare's trademark skills are on full display here: epic worlds, wrenching romances, heart-slamming plot twists, Dickensian characters. I can't wait to visit Castellane again."

The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch (2023)
Melinda Taub
"What a delicious book this is - like Lydia, it's headlong, a little wicked, and irrepressibly fun. And if that weren't enough, it gave me an entirely new lens through which to appreciate Jane Austen's Bennet family. Melinda Taub writes with a forensic wit and understanding of the desire to be loved and understood, even when those two things stand in seeming opposition. And like Georgette Heyer at her best, or, indeed, Austen, she has the alchemist's touch which turns this exploration into something delightful."

Pay as You Go (2023)
Eskor David Johnson
"Pay As You Go is an exuberant, maximalist delight."

Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind (2023)
Molly McGhee
"A deeply humane novel that perfectly marries the strangeness and terror of everything we can't explain about ourselves, to ourselves, and the everyday horrors of contemporary workplace culture. Molly McGhee knows the stuff our dreams are made of -- she's a marvelous chronicler of the fantastic, the perverse, and the sublime."

Fever House (2023)
(Fever House Duology, book 1)
Keith Rosson
"What a time to be undead! Keith Rosson has written an epic nightmare of a book, the kind that will jolt you out of whatever reading rut you've fallen into."

The Beast You Are (2023)
Paul Tremblay
"Inventive, entertaining, and guaranteed to trouble your sleep. I savored this collection - and I'm still thinking about the show-stopping tour-de-force novella in verse, 'The Beast You Are.' I've never read anything like it, but now I want more, more, more."

Ink Blood Sister Scribe (2023)
Emma Törzs
"A twisty and thrilling fantasy in which both the magic and the characters have real complexity, real shadows."

Beware the Woman (2023)
Megan Abbott
"Is there anyone like Megan Abbott? Beware the Woman is the work of a fearless cartographer of the darkest, seediest, most gloriously haunted landscapes of the human heart and psyche."

The Curator (2023)
Owen King
"The Curator feels a little like Owen King somehow brought a curiosity cabinet to life. There are terrors here, but also marvels and delights, and a set of the most interesting characters I've met in some time. Put The Curator on the same shelf as other classics of the uncanny and uncategorizable, like Susanna Clarke's Piranesi and Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast. I loved it."

Scorched Grace (2023)
(Sister Holiday Mysteries, book 1)
Margot Douaihy
"Margot Douaihy's Scorched Grace is pure, hard-boiled delight, and so is its protagonist, Sister Holiday. I can't wait for the next installment."

The Survivalists (2023)
Kashana Cauley
"Kashana Cauley understands all the possible ways in which our lives--relationships, roommates, jobs--can go suddenly, absurdly, inexorably, almost thrillingly wrong. If there was such a thing as required reading for living through the twenty-first century in America, I'd put The Survivalists near the top of the list. I loved it."

The Strange Inheritance of Leah Fern (2022)
Rita Zoey Chin
"The Strange Inheritance of Leah Fern is a bittersweet and achingly tender coming of age novel. Like V. E. Schwab and Audrey Niffenegger, Rita Zoey Chin is an expert guide to that territory in which magic, loss, and possibility change not only the characters but the reader, too."

Our Share of Night (2022)
Mariana Enríquez
"Reader, beware! Our Share of Night is a novel so disquieting, so unsettling that I could neither put it down nor read it late at night. Mariana Enriquez's short stories had already made me a fan for life - her novel is going to haunt me for the rest of my life."

Valleyesque (2022)
Fernando A Flores
"These are marvelously unpredictable stories, anchored by Fernando A. Flores's deadpan prose and his surefooted navigation of those overlapping territories, the real and the fantastic, where so much of the best contemporary fiction now lives."

Sleepwalk (2022)
Dan Chaon
"How to describe this excellent novel? Slapstick of the sinister might capture something of its peculiar, bighearted and epic scope, but Dan Chaon's books are always hard to sum up. Anyway, I loved it."

Quantum Girl Theory (2022)
Erin Kate Ryan
"A thrilling, many-faceted gothic novel: Erin Kate Ryan's Quantum Girl Theory belongs in the same company as the work of Shirley Jackson and Carmen Maria Machado."

Out There (2022)
Kate Folk
"An assortment of stories so sharp and ingenious you may cut yourself on them while reading, like a drawer full of the most beautiful knives - Out There goes onto my shelf of favorite collections."

The New Adventures of Helen (2021)
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
"A master of the short story form, a kindred spirit to writers like Angela Carter and Yumiko Kurahashi."

The Inheritance of Orquidea Divina (2021)
Zoraida Córdova
"I fell hard for this book. The dynamic, powerful mixture of secrets, stories, and longing that bind families together is Zoraida Córdova’s narrative engine, but her ability to evoke landscape and the numinous make The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina feel like an invitation into an enchanted garden."

Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost (2021)
David Hoon Kim
"The kind of book that holds you in a dream as you read it, intricate and frictionless and always marvelous. David Hoon Kim in his deep understanding of the strangeness of human experience and the connective bands between past, present, and future, belongs in the same company as writers like Emily St. John Mandel and Lauren Groff."

The First Law of Thermodynamics (2021)
James Patrick Kelly
"James Patrick Kelly has written some of my very favorite short stories. As a matter of fact, I get anxious when I haven't read a Kelly story in a while. Can't we just clone him?"

Summer in the City of Roses (2021)
Michelle Ruiz Keil
"A gorgeous, tender, warm-hearted reworking of mythic material that also feels resolutely set in the world that we live in."

Build Your House Around My Body (2021)
Violet Kupersmith
"A heady, gothic, spellbinder of a book."

Appleseed (2021)
Matt Bell
"Woven together out of the strands of myth, science fiction, and ecological warning, Matt Bell’s Appleseed is as urgent as it is audacious."

The Woman in the Purple Skirt (2021)
Natsuko Imamura
"Delightful, droll, and menacing, this novel about a seemingly harmless obsession could be the love child of Eugene Ionesco and Patricia Highsmith."

We Are Inevitable (2021)
Gayle Forman
"The fastest way to a girl’s heart is a novel set in a bookstore. I loved We Are Inevitable and its cast of characters (slightly damaged, a little shopworn, but never bargain-basement.) The only flaw: that Bluebird Books doesn’t exist in real life, and I can’t go there to browse."

Folklorn (2021)
Angela Mi-Young Hur
"Vivid and delectable...[Hur is] at home working in the fertile territories of myths and fantastic...I loved this."

The Ghost Variations (2021)
Kevin Brockmeier
"A teeming throng of stories in miniature in my favorite mode by one of my favorite writers. Brockmeier's ghosts range from the wistful to the terrifying--I could only wish that there were one hundred more."

Tales from the Hinterland (2021)
(Hazel Wood)
Melissa Albert
"Lush and deliciously sinister fairytales to be consumed as greedily as Turkish delight or any fairy fruit. I loved these."

The Office of Historical Corrections (2020)
Danielle Evans
"A dazzling collection. Contemporary life in Danielle Evans's stories has a kind of incandescent and dangerous energy: even in moments of somberness or isolation, her characters crackle with heat, light, and self-awareness."

Flyaway (2020)
Kathleen Jennings
"A fairytale wrapped about in riddles and other thorny bits of enchantments and stories, but none of them quite like any you've heard before. Kathleen Jennings' prose dazzles, and her magic feels real enough that you might even prick your finger on it."

The Anthill (2020)
Julianne Pachico
"As in all good ghost stories - and Pachico's The Anthill is superb - the haunting operates like a kind of blacklight, showing us how loss and trauma, invisible under ordinary circumstances, reverberate nevertheless through the life of an individual, a family, a country."

The Unwilling (2020)
(Barrier Lands, book 1)
Kelly Braffet
"A juggernaut of an epic fantasy novel with ingenious, thrilling twists and turns. Put this on the shelf beside Naomi Novik and George R. R. Martin. Kelly Braffet is a marvel and I'll read anything she writes."

Ninth House (2019)
(Alex Stern, book 1)
Leigh Bardugo
"Ninth House is the best thing I’ve read in a long time. There’s so much magic here that you'll begin to feel it seeping into the room around you as you read, and characters so real you ’ll practically hear their voices in your ear. Leigh Bardugo has written a book so delicious, so twisty, and so immersive I wouldn’t blame you for taking the day off to finish it."

The Grace Year (2019)
Kim Liggett
"A dark fairy tale of a book that speaks to the time that we live in."

A Song for a New Day (2019)
Sarah Pinsker
"An all-too plausible version of the apocalypse, rendered in such compelling prose that you won’t be able to put it down...a lively and hopeful look at how community and music and life goes on even in the middle of dark days and malevolent corporate shenanigans."

The City We Became (2019)
(Great Cities Trilogy, book 1)
N K Jemisin
"Jemisin is an absolute master."

The Absolute Book (2019)
Elizabeth Knox
"I love all of Elizabeth Knox’s books."

This Is How You Lose the Time War (2019)
Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
"If Iain M. Banks and Gerard Manley Hopkins had ever been able to collaborate on a science fiction project, well, it wouldn't be half as much fun as this novella by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. There is all the pleasure of a long series, and all the details of an much larger world, presented in miniature here."

The Silk Road (2019)
Kathryn Davis
"[Davis] is the kind of writer who makes me want to corner strangers on buses, so I can read whole paragraphs at them."

The New Me (2019)
Halle Butler
"THE NEW ME renders contemporary American life in such vivid, stinging color, that certain sentences are liable to give the reader a paper cut. But you'll want to keep on reading anyway. Halle Butler is terrific, and I loved this book."

The Mere Wife (2018)
Maria Dahvana Headley
"Maria Dahvana Headley translates the excesses of contemporary life into the gloriously mythic. This is not just an old story in new clothes: this is a consciousness-altering mind trip of a book."

Half-witch (2018)
John Schoffstall
"A picaresque fantasy debut in the mode of L. Frank Baum, in which witches and magic and God and goblins populate a world that is possibly just next door to our own. Lizbet and the witch girl Strix are delightful company in which to set out on the road."

Confessions of the Fox (2018)
Jordy Rosenberg
"With adventure, wit, and a ferocious heart, Confessions of the Fox is an astonishing, bawdy, dazzling triumph of a book."

MEM (2018)
Bethany C Morrow
"An extraordinary and utterly compelling novel that deftly explores questions of memory, identity, and humanity while also introducing one of my favourite characters in a long time. I loved everything about MEM."

The Merry Spinster (2018)
Daniel M Lavery and Mallory Ortberg
"A collection of stories delectable, formidable, and nimble. As a fantasist and short story writer, Mallory Ortberg is without peer."

Bash Bash Revolution (2018)
Douglas Lain
"Lain's writing is unsettling, ferociously smart, and extremely addictive."

Red Clocks (2018)
Leni Zumas
"Strange and lovely and luminous. I loved RED CLOCKS with my whole heart."

The Grave Keepers (2017)
Elizabeth Byrne
"A lyrical and gorgeously uncanny coming-of-age story of incantatory power."

Tropic of Kansas (2017)
Christopher Brown
"The great American novel about the end of America. This book is marvelously propulsive, big hearted, and whip smart."

Broken River (2017)
J Robert Lennon
"J Robert Lennon is a master of the are dark arts."

The Lonely Hearts Hotel (2017)
Heather O'Neill
"A fairytale laced with gunpowder."

Annihilation (2014)
(Southern Reach, book 1)
Jeff VanderMeer
"A dazzling book . . . haunted and haunting."

The Serial Garden (2008)
(Armitage Family)
Joan Aiken
"The best kind of writer, strange and spooky and surprising, never sentimental or whimsical."

The Keeper (2006)
(Bedford Horror, book 1)
Sarah Langan
"THE KEEPER kept me up, late into the night...I'm hoping for a whole shelf of novels by Langan."

Mortal Love (2004)
Elizabeth Hand
"You don't so much read this novel as drink it down, like absinthe."

More recommendations

Books containing stories by Kelly Link

The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2022 (2022)
(Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, book 8)
edited by
Rebecca Roanhorse

When Things Get Dark (2021)
edited by
Ellen Datlow

The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2020 (2020)
(Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, book 12)
edited by
Rich Horton

More books

Awards

1999 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story : The Specialist's Hat

Award nominations

	2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Best Book : Get in Trouble
	2006 World Fantasy Award for Best Collection : Magic for Beginners
	2002 World Fantasy Award for Best Collection : Stranger Things Happen
	1999 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story : Travels with the Snow Queen

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