A set of stories that are by turns dazzling, funny, scary, and sexy, but only when they’re not all of these at once. Kelly Link has strangeness, charm and spin to spare. Writers better than this don’t happen.
Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club
Kelly Link is probably the best short story writer currently out there, in any genre or none. She puts one word after another and makes real magic with them—funny, moving, tender, brave and dangerous. She is unique, and should be declared a national treasure, and possibly surrounded at all times by a cordon of armed marines. Neil Gaiman, author of American Gods

Kelly Link seems always to speak from a deep, deeply personal, and unexpected standpoint. . . . I think she is the most impressive writer of her generation.
Peter Straub, author of lost boy, lost girl

Link can handle slapstick comedy and Gothic horror, her stripped-down prose is light on description but rich in evocation and subterranean meaning. She embraces fantasy in its fullest sense and in doing so transcends all considerations of genre. . . . At their best, her stories have the vibrancy, the buzzing resonance and the oddly insistent quality of dreams. They aren’t linked to one
another, at least not in the sense that they share settings or characters, but they all draw water from the same clear, cold, deep well.
Andrew O’Hehir, The New York Times Book Review

. . . an alchemical mix of Borges, Raymond Chandler and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Laura Miller, Salon

This first collection by award-winning author Kelly Link takes fairy tales and cautionary tales, dictators, extraterrestrials, amnesiacs and readers into strange new territory. The girl detective goes to the underworld to solve the case of the tap-dancing bankrobbers. A honeymooning couple participate in an apocalyptic beauty pageant. Sexy blond aliens invade New York City. A young
girl learns how to make herself disappear.
These eleven extraordinary stories are quirky, spooky, and smart. They all have happy endings. Every story contains a secret prize. Each story was written especially for you, Jak.