Like Grimm's on a hit of acid. Or Lemony Snicket if he wasn't so flaccid. Just kidding, I love Snicket, i just wanted to make a rhyme. Maybe a bit like Miranda July's night terrors would be like after a night on magic mushrooms? Murakami inside Raoul Duke's body visiting a Hayao Miyazaki movie (say, Spirited Away)? Or really, I shouldn't bother with comparisons because Kelly Link is like nothing else I've ever read. One day I will no longer be surprised that I like books that everyone hates and

This is a collection of weird short stories which can be loosely qualified as urban fantasy. When I said the stories are weird, I really meant it. I would not be able to tell the plot of any of nine stories from the book. Do you want to know about a man loving a cannon? How about a man marrying a dead woman and having children? What about a whole nation sitting in a handbag? A son of a witch walking around in a cat costume made out of cats? You can have all of these and more.This is the second b...

I read one short story by Kelly Link in an anthology and knew that she was magical. I had to have more, so I stole my man's copy of Magic for Beginners and read through it in one sitting. The realm of the fantastic is usually not my thing, but well-written creative pieces are and this book definitely qualifies. "Stone Animals" in this collection is usually picked as the stand-out piece, and it surely deserves to be so (who else could make paint licking sound so right?), but there are others tha

Every bit as good as I remembered!

Reading Kelly Link makes me wonder why anyone else ever tries to write anything. Honestly. I mean, I'm sorry to have to say this to all the people who write short stories and everything, but "Stone Animals" is the absolute very best short story that has ever been written. Oh, wait, except for "Lull"; that is actually the very best short story that has ever been written ever. I can't decide, but anyway, the rest of the writing world should just give it up, nothing can top this book.Honestly I can...

Kelly Link writes what I should love - quirky, whimsical, creative and fantastical ideas with often dark imagery - but somehow all this mix of interesting things never ends up being a story. Most entries in Magic in Beginners will draw you in with a unique idea, image or scene; this is the case with two of the best stories in the volume, The Faery Handbag and Catskin. In the first a young woman loses a handbag which belonged to her elderly grandmother, and tells its story: the handbag was a magi...

Weird Modern Fairy Tales for Adults by a Writer with a Unique Voice3.5 starsMy introduction to slipstream short story writer Kelly Link was her recently issued Get in Trouble. I got off on the wrong foot with that short story collection and did not finish it.I'm glad I gave her another chance. I liked this collection, Magic for Beginners, a lot better, although it, too had some drawbacks.The author's stories are extremely creative and her voice is totally unique (although there were some vague s...

I've only got so much patience for surrealist storytelling, so maybe this was not the anthology for me. The early stories in the collection are the kind of dream-logic-based oddities that, when you stumble upon them surrounded by other writers' work, are interesting, if a little unsatisfying in their lack of conclusion. For example, when Eastern European refugees hide in a magical handbag and a wayward boyfriend makes off with it, the idea is clever and the writing both fantastic and absurd. But...

You can find this review and more at Novel Notions. Something I’ve noticed over the course of my recent reading life is that, if you’re in the mood for weird, you should definitely look into short story collections. Some of the strangest and most memorable fiction I’ve read in the past five years or so have been short stories. This is not a format I thought I enjoyed, as I prefer to dig more deeply into a story than twenty pages or so can accommodate. Honestly, I probably never would have given

Link garners effusive praise from Jonathan Lethem, China Mieville, Michael Chabon, Peter Straub, Alice Sebold, et al. Sometimes I get it, and sometimes I don't. Some of her stories I enjoy, some of them I don't. For example, take the two stories in this collection that I had read previously: Catskin and Stone Animals, both of which I read in McSweeney's. I liked Catskin slightly more the second time around, but it still rates a thumbs down. It's the tale of a witch and her three children and her...

You may officially put me down as a Kelly Link fan.I understand why her writing might not be to everyone's taste. One of the blurbs on this books describes it as 'elliptical' - yes. She comes at ideas sideways and leaves things unfinished, ambiguous, to be considered. It can be frustrating. But at the same time, I love it.Two of the stories here overlap with those in 'Pretty Monsters.' So this was my third time reading 'The Faery Handbag' (I'll be happy to read it some more times, too), and my s...

Here's the review from my twice-yearly zine (October '06). I think I preferred Link's debut short story collection, Stranger Things Happen, but I definitely appreciate what she's aiming for her. Nobody writes stories quite like hers:Kelly Link is herself no stranger to the bizarre,or even to charges of sometimes wading too deepinto its waters for some readers’ taste.In a recent missive to members of her onlinewriting workshop, Link encouraged writers to“submit more ambitious work....stories and

I've read the titular story twice -- once years ago in an anthology, before Link's name was familiar to me, and then again recently in Other Worlds Than These. It is, briefly, about some teens watching a tv serial about a magical library. The story is very good, but what I really want is to see the show that they're watching. Or to actually live in The Library. And I've read The Faery Handbag which is in the anthology The Faery Reel: Tales from the Twilight Realm and also available free at the S...

A canny short story writer with a wholly unique vocabulary, range and personality. The closest touchstone in history would be Donald Barthelme, though Link furthers this ironical postmodern format to incorporate fables, fantasies and fairytales into her cleverly conceived mini-epics. It's hypetacular.

I enjoyed the first story, "The Faery Handbag", and then it went downhill from there. This "slipstream fiction" is simply not for me. It read like complete nonsense and I was too bored to want to try harder to understand it.

For some reason, I assumed this was a young adult title; I think it was the cover, or possibly the name.Link's characters are for the most part grotesques, like those of Sherwood Anderson and Miranda July (but way better than July), only infused with a bit of magic. The stories are full of strange people doing normal things in strange places, or normal people doing strange things in strange places, or some other variation. There are some wonderful, bizarre descriptions and the little illustratio...

How I read this: freebieDNF @ 24%What did I just read? I feel like every short story collection I read puts me farther and farther away from short story collections in general. They're just too bizzare and in the end I have no idea what it was even about because you have to comb for meaning as if you're looking for a needle in a haystack.Book Blog | Bookstagram | Bookish Twitter

A short story by Kelly Link is a suicide snow cone that tastes like the best thing you never knew you could have.Turning the pages of Magic for Beginners, you are never quite sure what you will get, but after one or two stories you quickly realize that this random unknowing is the one constant, and what you quickly learn to love about a Kelly Link story. You welcome the jump, allowing the rabbit hole door to lock behind you, even hoping that it does. When I say rabbit hole, I really mean the sec...

It's somewhat unfair to put this as read, since I haven't read all the stories in it. But I'd read enough to know that it wasn't really my cup of tea. That's entirely a subjective reaction and could be as much due to what my expectations were. It's like putting an olive in your mouth thinking that it's a grape - the shock puts you off even if the olive is perfectly good for what it is. When I bought this, it was shelved under the Fantasy section. I was expecting Fantasy a la Charles de Lint and

Nine short stories of magical realism, stories that shift effortlessly from fairy-tale mode to a much more naturalistic mode to surreal absurdity.The thing about these stories--the frustrating, beautiful thing--is that they are not merely hard to understand. They resist all efforts to understand them. They hint at the feeling that, oh, if only you were smart enough, if only you spent enough time decoding the symbolism and the turns of phrase, everything would suddenly become bright-clear and rev...