Kelly Link Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Ghosts of the Shadow Market Books

Publication Order of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet Books

Publication Order of The WisCon Chronicles Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Kelly Link is best known as the author of literary fiction, general fantasy, young adult fantasy, and horror fiction novels.

She is best known for her short story collection with her most popular being “Stranger Things Happen.”
Her other collections include “Get in Trouble,” “Pretty Monsters,” “Magic for Beginners,” and “White Cat, Black Dog,” which made the final shortlist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Over the years, Kelly Link’s novels have been published in the likes of “Prize Stories,” “The Best American Short Stories,” and “The Magazine of Fantasy Science Fiction.”
In 2018, she received a National Endowment for the Arts and the MacArthur Fellowship.

She has also worked with Gavin J. Grant and together they have co-edited several anthologies including “Monstrous Affections,” “Steampunk,” and several volumes of “The Year’s Best Horror and Fantasy for Young Adults.”
She is also the co-editor of “Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet,” which is an occasional zine. Kelly also cofounded the “Small Beer Press.”

She currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts with her husband and one child, and is the owner of “Book Moon,” the independent bookstore in Easthampton.

In her teenage years, Kelly Link went to study creative writing at Columbia and it was there that she began writing the manuscript for her debut novel.

She showed several of the chapters to her professor who then showed them to his editor and agent. They asked if she was interested in finishing it, but since she had recently won a six-month trip in a lottery she declined the offer.
At that time, she believed the trip was more pressing than finishing her novel and by the time she returned, she had lost all passion for writing.

After she graduated from the Greensboro-based University of North Carolina with her M.F.A., she enrolled in the Clarion Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop.

At the workshop, she got to meet many aspiring authors who were just as lost as her. She also met people who admired the many authors she liked such as Tolkien, Asimov, and Heinlein.
At the college, it was always clear to many of her professors that Kelly was very talented and wrote better than many of her colleagues and even the professors.

While she believed that she had a bright future, things did not pan out as she expected after graduating from college.

For many years, Kelly Link tried selling a collection for many years but most editors said they liked her stories but asked if she had a novel instead.

At some point, she moved to Boston where she started working at a bookstore which is where she met Grant the gregarious Scot who would become her husband.

After becoming frustrated by publishers, she decided to team up with her husband and together they started “Small Beer Press” their own publishing business.

“Stranger Things Happen” was the first thing they ever published. They were thinking that if they could not sell Kelly’s collection, there could be other authors that might have other collections they might help them publish.
They also established “Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet,” a zine that together with the press is an avenue for slightly weird unpublished authors to become published.
Still, they also publish novels by established authors such as Ted Chiang, Joan Aiken, and Ursula K. Le Guin.

Kelly Link’s collection “Stranger Things Happen” is the author’s first work.

In this, she takes cautionary tales and fairy tales, extraterrestrials and dictators, honeymooners and amnesiacs, readers and revenants alike on a voyage into wonderful, strange, and new territory.

In one story, a girl detective needs to head to the underworld and investigate the mysterious case of tap-dancing robbers. In another, sexy blond aliens have been invading New York City. A young girl is learning how to make herself disappear.
A newly married couple enrolls and participates in an apocalyptic beauty pageant. There is a librarian who falls in love with the daughter of a collector of artificial noses while a dead man somehow sends letters to his estranged wife from the other world.
These are smart, spooky, and quirky stories with sappy endings and a secret prize. They are all penned with a light hand and are crazy, bittersweet, absurd, and spooky.

Each story seems to be perfectly self-contained but on the whole, there is a hint of a bigger world and it is possible that everything may be all related.

The author goes against tradition, as she writes in an experimental fashion in the present tense and in the second person which is not very common nowadays.

In “Get in Trouble” Kelly Link once again shows her brilliance as she constructs unforgettable fictional universes in each story.

“The Summer People” is set in rural North Carolina where a young girl is the caretaker to never quite glimpsed and mysterious visitors that live in the cottage behind her house.
The middle-aged movie star in “I Can See Right Through You” heads to a swamp in Florida to take part in a ghost-hunting reality show with a former on-off-screen love interest.
In the short story “The New Boyfriend,” there is an unusual turn at a slumber party in the suburbs where a teenage friendship is severely tested.

The stories in this collection encompass anything and everything from the Pyramids, Hurricanes, superheroes, astronauts, “The Wizard of Oz,” and evil twins.
But as fantastical as the stories can be, they are grounded in innate generosity and sly humor.

“Magic for Beginners” by Kerry Link is a work in which you will never be sure what you will get when you open the next page. Nonetheless, you will come to realize that the random unknowing is what makes Kelly’s story so sweet.
The nine stories of the collection mirror those in her debut “Stranger Things Happen” as the author blends pathos and quirky humor to make for delicate lyrical fantasy.

In “Stone Animals,” a house is haunted by hordes of rabbits who come out to camp on the front lawn each night. This results in some inexplicable phenomena that soon start to cause rifts in the new family that just moved into the house.
In “Magic for Beginners,” the title of the collection, the author showcases the unpredictable potential of teenagers by following several teen friends whose experiences are similar to a surreal TV fantasy series.

Another interesting story is “Some Zombie Contingency Plans” in which zombies showcase a young man’s anxieties for the future in stark contrast to two store clerks from the story “The Hortlak.”
In this collection, Kelly Link brings forth new perspectives as she explores familiar premises.