NATIONAL BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • A bewitching story collection from the author of White Cat, Black Dog and The Book of Love , hailed as “the most darkly playful voice in American fiction” (Michael Chabon) and “our greatest living fabulist” (Carmen Maria Machado) “Ridiculously brilliant . . . These stories make you laugh while staring into the void.”— The Boston Globe A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: BuzzFeed, Time, The Washington Post, NPR, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Slate, Toronto Star, Kirkus Reviews, BookPage Kelly Link has won an ardent following for her ability, with each new short story, to take readers deeply into an unforgettable, brilliantly constructed fictional universe. The nine exquisite examples in this collection show her in full command of her formidable powers. In “The Summer People,” a young girl in rural North Carolina serves as uneasy caretaker to the mysterious, never-quite-glimpsed visitors who inhabit the cottage behind her house. In “I Can See Right Through You,” a middle-aged movie star makes a disturbing trip to the Florida swamp where his former on- and off-screen love interest is shooting a ghost-hunting reality show. In “The New Boyfriend,” a suburban slumber party takes an unusual turn, and a teenage friendship is tested, when the spoiled birthday girl opens her big present: a life-size animated doll. Hurricanes, astronauts, evil twins, bootleggers, Ouija boards, iguanas, The Wizard of Oz, superheroes, the Pyramids . . . These are just some of the talismans of an imagination as capacious and as full of wonder as that of any writer today. But as fantastical as these stories can be, they are always grounded by sly humor and an innate generosity of feeling for the frailty—and the hidden strengths—of human beings. In Get in Trouble, this one-of-a-kind talent expands the boundaries of what short fiction can do. “Welcome to the fabulous mind of Kelly Link. . . . It has taken Link ten years to produce her new story collection, Get in Trouble, and it is just as brilliant as her last.” — The New York Times Book Review (Editor’s Choice) “Ridiculously brilliant . . . and entertaining as heck . . . These stories make you laugh while staring into the void. By the end, they’ll be with you sleeping and waking.” — The Boston Globe “Marvelous . . . As a writer Kelly Link is possessed of many magical powers, but to me what’s most notable about her new collection, Get in Trouble, is its astonishing freedom. . . . Link knows there’s nothing she’s ‘supposed’ to do; her imaginative freedom is unmitigated by a need to counterbalance the weirdness with explanation.” —Meg Wolitzer, NPR “Smashing . . . sensational . . . Each of these stories presents the reader with the same setup: Remain in your narrative comfort zone, or venture into Link’s uncharted sea of troubles. Come on. Live a little.” — O: The Oprah Magazine “This is art that re-enchants the world. Who needs tediously believable situations, O. Henry endings or even truthfulness to life? Give us magic; give us wonder. What matter most in pure storytelling are style and visionary power. If your voice is hypnotic enough, you can make readers follow you anywhere.” — The Washington Post “When it comes to literary magic, Link is the real deal: clever, surprising, affecting, fluid and funny.” — San Francisco Chronicle “Brilliantly strange . . . With every tale [Link] conjures a different universe, each more captivating than the last. At first glance these realms don’t seem too far from our own, but soon their wild, mysterious corners are illuminated. . . . You’ll long to return the minute you leave. [Grade:] A” — Entertainment Weekly “ Get in Trouble is one of the strongest collections I’ve read recently; each story is finely calibrated, with Link’s surreal but utterly believable logic, suspense, and heart.” — The Paris Review “Wildly imaginative . . . Link never fusses over the surreal twists in her stories, but they contain so much emotional truth that there’s no need to explain a thing.” — The New York Times “[ Get in Trouble ] resonates with depth and maturity, the sense of a writer using genre for her purposes rather than the other way around. . . . The stories here are effective because we believe them—not just their situations but also their hearts. . . . [Kelly Link] has created a series of fully articulated pocket universes, animated by a three-dimensional sense of character, of life.” — Los Angeles Times “Since her 2001 debut, Stranger Things Happen, no one has surpassed Link at crafting stories like miniature worlds, each one palatial on the inside, honeycombed with alternate realities and alarmingly seductive. . . . A new Link collection is therefore more than just a good excuse for a trip to the bookstore. It’s a zero-gravity vacation in a dust jacket.” — Chicago Tribune “Magical . . . The stories in Get in Trouble are something like the w