Product Description

This first collection award-winning author Kelly Link, 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #283193 in Books
• Published on: 2001-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 266 pages

Salon.com
"An alchemical mix of Borges, Raymond Chandler and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

The New York Times Book Review
She embraces fantasy in its fullest sense and in doing so transcends all considerations of genre.

The Washington Post
Stranger Things Happen is a tremendously appealing book...

Customer Reviews

queen of the new weird.
Kelly Link's stories have a playful aproach to genre, structure and plot but to center in this is utterly missleading. They are worth reading because of a stunnig gift for character. They touch a nerve, some basic human concerns we all share : love, lust, loneliness you pick your choice.
On the other hand, stories in this collection has won all the major awards in genre fiction.
So these tales feature both the human heart and all its contradiction and some of the best gosth stories you are ever going to read.

dissapointed
I bought this book along with Link's most recent book "Magic For Beginners" due mainly to the high praise that is heaped on these two collections. Sadly (at least with "Stranger Things Happen") I'm left feeling dissapointed. The writing is very good but the stories just dont "do it" for me. I have yet to read "Magic" and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it will be as good as the majority of critics seem to think. Before you buy this book (Sranger Things) try and loan a copy first or I do believe there maybe a free downloadable copy from Link's official web site?

Instead of buying this I would suggest you try Jeff vandermeer's "city of saints and madmen", far more satisfying,a worthy 5 star book.

A bit disappointed
The ghost story is one of my favourite genres, so I was looking forward to reading Kelly Link's collection 'Stranger Things Happen', especially 'The Specialist's Hat', which I had heard so much about. I haven't actually finished the book, but I believe I have read enough of the stories to have some idea of the prevailing atmospheres and stylistic quirks, the kind of fantasy, or strangeness, Kelly Link engages with. The worlds she creates are quite unique, curious and sometimes very disturbing. The first story, 'Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose', contains possibly the most unsettling vision of hell I have come across, and I have come across quite a few. That's not to say I like the story or am looking forward to rereading it, because it was also rather depressing. 'The Specialist's Hat' is not depressing, and I initially found it very gripping; it built the atmosphere gradually, the characters were believable and the world created within the story settled around me with a satisfying completeness. Then things started to go awry (and not in a good way; the atmosphere became less, rather than more, disturbing). I won't spoil the story for those who haven't read it, and it is certainly worth reading. But I have a problem with ghost stories whose worlds are too erratic; stories that have too many of the characteristics of a dream or nightmare. In such a story, as in a certain kind of fairytale, it soon becomes evident that practically anything can happen, provided it is quirky or startling enough. This, for me, dissipates the density of the atmosphere; the pressure eases, the laws of the universe become all too clear and genuine surprises (nasty or otherwise) become almost impossible. But the story is engaging, there are some wonderful touches and the scraps of poetry (always risky in any story) are properly, perfectly creepy.