Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1244367 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 272 pages

Review
Praise for Kelly Link: 'A new collection by Kelly Link -- and once more, for a little while, the world is worth saving.' Michael Chabon 'These stories will come alive, put on zoot suits and wrestle you to the ground.' Alice Sebold '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 'The exact best and strangiest and funniest short story writer on earth.' Jonathan Lethem 'The most impressive writer of her generation.' Peter Straub 'Her stories have the vibrancy, the buzzing resonance and the oddly insistent quality of dreams.' New York Times 'Weird, funny, sad, scary, moving, hip, ingeniously executed and brilliantly written stuff.' Independent on Sunday 'Link's exquisite stories mix the aggravations and epiphanies of everyday life with the stuff that myths, dreams and nightmares are made of.' Salon 'A frighteningly original collection of stories from a frighteningly original voice.' SFX 'A superb collection!Link is the literary descendent of Jorge Luis Borges and Franz Kafka!It's complex; it's also continually surprising, compelling and strange!The first time I read "Magic for Beginners" I marvelled at the seamless integration of reality and otherness. With each subsequent reading I became more enamoured of the language, the voice, the glorious sentences themselves. Gobsmacking magnificence.' Guardian

Independent on Sunday
'Weird, funny, sad, scary, moving, hip, ingeniously executed and
brilliantly written stuff.'

Guardian
'A superb collection...Link is the literary descendent of Jorge
Luis Borges and Franz Kafka...Gobsmacking magnificence.'

Customer Reviews

No Zombie contingency plan
I really enjoyed this book, it oozed ideas and some interesting counter intuitive phrasing, characterisation was excellent. I have never encountered a book which conveyed a sense of the unreality of myths, fairytales, witchcraft etc more effectively. The only thing that has prevented me from giving it five stars is somethiong to do with the typesetting, or at least thats what I think caused my problem. Perhaps the publisher has squeezed more words onto the page, or used a slightly unfamiliar font, I am not sure but whatever it was despite loving almost every sentence I found I made remarkably slow progress reading it. Make of this what you will, and remember I really enjoyed the book.

One of my favourite books ever
Wow, what an amazing read. I loved that all the stories are linked not directly the the allusion to similar themes and subject matter is quite sophisticated. Exceptionally well written, genre defying stuff.

Well-written but empty
I've just given up in the last story of this book. There is some beautiful writing here, but the stories fail to have dramatic impulse or tail off into disappointing endings. Typical is the short story which gives its name to the collection "Magic for Beginners". It starts off effectively with a group of young people obsessed with a television series mildly reminiscent of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, but its resolution shows no logic. Too often, we are in a fantasy world and it doesn't matter what happens; which reminds me that I would be better off watching Buffy.