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eBook Category: Mainstream/Fantasy Firecracker Book Award Nominee, Locus Recommended Reading List, World Fantasy Award Nominee, Locus Poll Award Nominee
eBook Description: Award-winning author Kelly Link's debut collection takes fairy tales and cautionary tales, dictators and extraterrestrials, amnesiacs and honeymooners, revenants and readers alike, on a voyage into new, strange, and wonderful territory. The girl detective must go to the underworld to solve the case of the tap-dancing bank robbers. A librarian falls in love with a girl whose father collects artificial noses. A dead man posts letters home to his estranged wife. Two women named Louise begin a series of consecutive love affairs with a string of cellists. A newly married couple become participants 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. Stories from Stranger Things Happen have won the Nebula, Tiptree, and World Fantasy Awards.

eBook Publisher: Small Beer Press/Jelly Ink Press, Published: 2001
Fictionwise Release Date: July 2005

13 Reader Ratings:

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"Kelly Link's debut collection fuses storytelling smarts with postmodern flair, Nancy Drew with Philip K. Dick.... But behind the fancy, darker shapes emerge. 'Water Off a Black Dog's Back' and 'The Specialist's Hat' are irresistible modern horror stories that go about their business with such charm it's a shock when their traps snick shut, while 'The Girl Detective' is a sly disarticulation of whodunits and the underworld that's as fun to read as it is heartbreaking--a great pop coup."--Village Voice's Lit Parade: Our 25 Favorite Books of 2001

"Kelly Link's exquisite stories mix the aggravations and epiphanies of everyday life with the stuff that myths, dreams and nightmares are made of. Some of them are very scary, others are immensely sad, many are funny and all of them are written in prose so flawless you almost forget how much elemental human chaos they contain."--Laura Miller, Salon (Top 10 Books of the Year)

"Sly and charming, tart and wise."--San Francisco Chronicle

"The best collection of fantasy (defined broadly) stories to appear in a good long while.... Stranger Things Happen is a tremendously appealing book, and lovers of short fiction should fall over themselves getting out the door to find a copy."--Washington Post Book World

"The 11 fantasies in this first collection from rising star Link are so quirky and exuberantly imagined that one is easily distracted from their surprisingly serious underpinnings of private pain and emotional estrangement ... the best shed a warm, weird light on their worlds, illuminating fresh perspectives and fantastic possibilities."--Publishers Weekly

"As soon as one is tempted to compare Link's writing to anything or anyone, she gracefully slithers into another skin. Her stories are satisfying, bizarre, hilarious and beautiful."--Juliet Waters, Montreal Mirror

"Hilarious, forgiving, wise."--John Clute

Part, of you is always traveling faster, always traveling ahead. Even when you are moving, it is never fast enough to satisfy that part of you. You enter the walls of the city early in the evening when the cobblestones are a mottled pink with reflected light, and cold beneath the slap of your bare, bloody feet. You ask the man who is guarding the gate to recommend a place to stay the night, and even as you are falling into the bed at the inn, the bed, which is piled high with quilts and scented with lavender, perhaps alone, perhaps with another traveler, perhaps with the guardsman who had such brown eyes, and a mustache that curled up on either side of his nose like two waxed black laces, even as this guardsman, whose name you didn't ask calls out a name in his sleep that is not your name, you are dreaming about the road again. When you sleep, you dream about the long white distances that still lie before you. When you wake up, the guardsman is back at his post, and the place between your legs aches pleasantly, your legs sore as if you had continued walking all night in your sleep. While you were sleeping, your feet have healed again. You were careful not to kiss the guardsman on the lips, so it doesn't really count, does it.

Your destination is North. The map that you are using is a mirror. You are always pulling the bits out of your bare feet, the pieces of the map that broke off and fell on the ground as the Snow Queen flew overhead in her sleigh. Where you are, where you are coming from, it is impossible to read a map made of paper. If it were that easy then everyone would be a traveler. You have heard of other travelers whose maps are breadcrumbs, whose maps are stones, whose maps are the four winds, whose maps are yellow bricks laid one after the other. You read your map with your foot, and behind you somewhere there must be another traveler whose map is the bloody footprints that you are leaving behind you.

There is a map of fine white scars on the soles of your feet that tells you where you have been. When you are pulling the shards of the Snow Queen's looking-glass out of your feet, you remind yourself, you tell yourself to imagine how it felt when Kay's eyes, Kay's heart were pierced by shards of the same mirror. Sometimes it is safer to read maps with your feet.

Ladies. Has it ever occurred to you that fairy tales aren't easy on the feet?