White Cat, Black Dog

Seven modern fairytales from Pulitzer Prize finalist Kelly Link, featuring illustrations by award-winning artist Shaun Tan.

Leaving behind the enchanted castles, deep, dark woods and gingerbread cottages of fairytales for airport waiting rooms, alien planets and a cannabis farm run by a team of hospitable cats, White Cat, Black Dog offers a fresh take on the stories that you thought you knew. Here you'll find stoner students, failing actors and stranded professors questing for love, revenge or even just a sense of purpose. Poised on the edges between magic, modernity and mundanity, this collection will remind you once again of why Kelly Link is incomparable in the realm of short fiction.

Don't stray from the path!
Not without Kelly Link as your guide.

'Uncanny brilliance' Sunday Times
'An expert illusionist' New Yorker
'Link is a genius' LA Times
'Thrilling... glittering' Spectator
'A short story sorceress' Washington Post
'Joyful... awe-inspiring' Jessamine Chan
'Contains all the good stuff' Bustle
'Magically transporting' Salon
'Wonderfully told' BuzzFeed
'Liable to linger in your mind' Today
'Enchanting' Publishers Weekly
'Wondrous' Stephen Graham Jones
'This book is sublime' Emma Straub
'Enchanting... unsettling' Kiersten White
'Glorious and bewitching' Clare Beams
Tales you live inside' Victor Lavalle
'Luminous... surreal' Kate Mascarenhas


Genre: Fantasy

"With White Cat, Black Dog, these stories delight and terrify us, and seem to say, Yes, this is the way the world works - haven't you been paying attention? I am now. What a glorious and bewitching gift this book is." - Clare Beams

"Reading Kelly Link is stepping onto a slide that spirals you down into the heart of the kaleidoscope and makes you either smile wide enough that you cry, or the other way around. Her storytelling is wondrous and fanciful, full of longing and terror." - Stephen Graham Jones

"Kelly Link is the Alice Munro of the fantastic. These are big stories, tales you dive into, live inside, and come out the other end changed. Together, they make a glorious book, full of grand journeys across different times, experiences, and realities." - Victor LaValle

"Kelly Link's stories are spooky and funny, grounded and floating, and, as always, completely her own. There is no mistaking a story by Kelly Link. This book is sublime." - Emma Straub

"Kelly Link's stories are generous with their intellect, wit, humanity, and the hope and dread of what was, of what might be, of what is. White Cat, Black Dog is a marvel." - Paul Tremblay

"Kelly Link's stories wriggle under your skin and take up a permanent home there, and somehow you're grateful to be infested. White Cat, Black Dog is enchanting collection from one of the most astonishingly funny, unsettling, insightful, and brilliant writers of our time." - Kiersten White