Get In Trouble

FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A bewitching story collection from a writer hailed as “the most darkly playful voice in American fiction” (Michael Chabon) and “a national treasure” (Neil Gaiman). NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY BookPage • BuzzFeed • Chicago Tribune • Kirkus Reviews • NPR • San Francisco Chronicle • Slate • Time • Toronto Star • The Washington Post 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. Praise for Get in Trouble “Ridiculously brilliant . . . These stories make you laugh while staring into the void.”—The Boston Globe “When it comes to literary magic, Link is the real deal: clever, surprising, affecting, fluid and funny.”—San Francisco Chronicle

Fantastic, fantastical and utterly incomparable, Get in Trouble rummages in the cupboards of our psyches and pulls out fierce truths about everything from the essence of ghosts to the nature of love. And hurricanes, astronauts, evil twins, bootleggers, Ouija boards, iguanas, The Wizard of Oz, superheroes, the pyramids . . . Strange, dark and wry, the stories in Get in Trouble reveal Kelly Link at the height of her creative powers and stretch the boundaries of the human imagination.

A new, much anticipated collection of stories from the inimitable Kelly Link. 'These nine stories may begin in familiar territory - a birthday party, a theme park, a bar, a spaceship - but they quickly draw readers into an imaginative, disturbingly ominous world of realistic fantasy and unreal reality. Like Kafka hosting Saturday Night Live, Link mixes humour with existential dread...Her characters, driven by yearning and obsession, not only get in trouble but seek trouble out - to spectacular effect.' Publishers Weekly 'Darkly funny, sexy, frightening, and truly weird - Link can dismantle and remake the world in a paragraph.' Karen Russell 'The most darkly playful voice in American fiction.' Michael Chabon 'She is unique and should be declared a national treasure.' Neil Gaiman 'Richly imagined, intellectually teasing: these are not so much small fictions as windows on to entire worlds. A brilliant, giddying read.' Sarah Waters Kelly Link is the author of the collections Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, The Wrong Grave and Pretty Monsters. Her short stories have been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. Link is the co-founder of Small Beer Press. She was born in Miami, Florida and now lives with her husband and daughter in Northampton, Massachusetts. 'Very much fun.' Margaret Atwood, Twitter 'Kelly Link is inimitable. Her stories are like nothing else, dark yet sparkling with her unique brand of fairy dust, wonderfully strange but still familiar and real. Get in Trouble is filled with pocket universes, each tale containing so much more than its length might suggest and crackling with the unexpect: the most marvelous kind of trouble to get in.' Erin Morgenstern 'In this utterly astonishing new collection, Kelly Link demonstrates a perfect and completely mature command of the entirely unexpected, ever-evolving, self-examining, deeply original and personal, emotion-riddled kind of story only Kelly Link is capable of writing.' Peter Straub 'Exquisite, cruelly wise and the opposite of reassuring, these stories linger like dreams and will leave readers looking over their shoulders for their own ghosts.' Kirkus 'Nobody writes stories like Kelly Link...Seek out this book and then dig through her others: she's a modern master of the short story, skewering our lives at every step.' Thousands 'It resonates with depth and maturity, the sense of a writer using genre for her purposes rather than the other way around...With Get In Trouble, she has created a series of fully articulated pocket universes, animated by a three-dimensional sense of character, of life.' LA Times 'The nine stories in Link's fourth collection sizzle with surprises...Link is one of a kind.' BBC 'Does any writer have a better, deeper instinct for the subterranean overlap between pop culture and myth...Link remains a master of a delicate genre.' Salon 'Link's stories are never fully realist, but they are always beautifully written...Like other writers in the tradition of the modern American short story, she wants us to look closely at the small stuff of life.' New York Times Book Review '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...her imaginative freedom is unmitigated by a need to counterbalance the weirdness with explanation.’ Meg Wolitzer ‘Kelly Link in a nutshell: inordinately brainy, always concise, darkly whimsical, and entertaining as heck.’ Boston Globe ‘Link’s writing is characterised by both a high literary value and a deep human sentiment. Images and language sparkle, imagination and craft combining to create the most vivid of reading experiences.’ Toronto Star ‘Link is always in exquisite control–a committed emotional realist with a bottomless bag of surprises.’ New York Magazine ‘I’d rather read Kelly Link than breathe...This book is everything I wished for.’ NZ Herald ‘Link should be required reading for every writer, even writers whose styles deviate completely from hers: it is necessary to understand the sheer possibilities of form, of genre. To understand how rules can be twisted, snapped, shattered.’ LA Review of Books ‘When it comes to literary magic, Link is the real deal: clever, surprising, affecting, fluid and funny.’ San Francisco Chronicle ‘Link’s prose and ideas dazzle; so much so that you don’t see the swift elbow to the emotional solar plexus coming until it’s far, far too late.’ Guardian ‘Ms. 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.’ New York Times ‘With every tale [Link] conjures a different universe, each more captivating than the last...you’ll long to return the minute you leave.’ 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.’ Catherine Carberry, Paris Review ‘All I want is for everyone to devour [Link’s] books.’ Longreads ‘It’s a challenge to describe Kelly Link’s dazzling short stories. On the one hand they are deliciously, deliriously strange...Yet they are also sad, sexy, tender, keenly aware not just of the human yearning at their centres, but of the absurdities those desires lead us into.’ Weekend Australian ‘Get in Trouble is a dazzling testimony to the malleability of [Link’s] medium and her mastery of it.’ New Zealand Listener ‘Link effectively mixes the dark fantastic with Borgesian quirkiness.’ Sydney Morning Herald ‘It’s little wonder that the short story seems to be having its moment in the sun; here it shows its ability to compress lifetimes seething with tension and crystallise moments blazing with desire and defiance, into handfuls of taut, finely wrought pages.’ Age

Caldecott Honor artist and bestseller David Shannon make readers laugh aloud in this next story about the troublemaking David! "When David gets in trouble, he always says . . . 'NO! It's not my fault! I didn't mean to! It was an accident!'" Whatever the situation, David's got a good excuse. And no matter what he's done "wrong," it's never really his fault. Soon, though, David realizes that making excuses makes him feel bad, and saying he's sorry makes him feel better. Once again, David Shannon entertains us with young David's mischievous antics and a lighthearted story that's sure to leave kids (and parents) laughing.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD LONGLIST • “A masterpiece” (NPR) about marriage, divorce, and the bewildering dynamics of ambition Coming soon as an FX limited series on Hulu, starring Claire Danes, Jesse Eisenberg, Lizzy Caplan, and Adam Brody ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—Entertainment Weekly, The New York Public Library ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—The New York Times Book Review, Time, The Washington Post, USA Today Vanity Fair, Vogue, NPR, Chicago Tribune, GQ, Vox, Refinery29, Elle, The Guardian, Real Simple, Financial Times, Parade, Good Housekeeping, New Statesman, Marie Claire, Town & Country, Evening Standard, Thrillist, Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, BookPage, BookRiot, Shelf Awareness Toby Fleishman thought he knew what to expect when he and his wife of almost fifteen years separated: weekends and every other holiday with the kids, some residual bitterness, the occasional moment of tension in their co-parenting negotiations. He could not have predicted that one day, in the middle of his summer of sexual emancipation, Rachel would just drop their two children off at his place and simply not return. He had been working so hard to find equilibrium in his single life. The winds of his optimism, long dormant, had finally begun to pick up. Now this. As Toby tries to figure out where Rachel went, all while juggling his patients at the hospital, his never-ending parental duties, and his new app-assisted sexual popularity, his tidy narrative of the spurned husband with the too-ambitious wife is his sole consolation. But if Toby ever wants to truly understand what happened to Rachel and what happened to his marriage, he is going to have to consider that he might not have seen things all that clearly in the first place. A searing, utterly unvarnished debut, Fleishman Is in Trouble is an insightful, unsettling, often hilarious exploration of a culture trying to navigate the fault lines of an institution that has proven to be worthy of our great wariness and our great hope. Alma’s Best Jewish Novel of the Year • Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize for Best First Book

"I Can See Right Through You", by Kelly Link, is an off-kilter ghost story (or not) about an estranged couple who have remained friends long after they were originally paired in a vampire movie that made them famous. Now the demon lover searches out his former lover in Florida while she is in the middle of filming a tv episode about ghost hunting.

From Cecile Richards, the former president of Planned Parenthood for more than a decade, daughter of the late Ann Richards, featured speaker at the Women’s March on Washington, and “the heroine of the resistance” (Vogue), comes “an enthralling memoir” (Booklist, starred review) filled with “practical advice and inspiration for aspiring leaders everywhere” (Hillary Rodham Clinton). Cecile Richards has been an activist since she was taken to the principal’s office in seventh grade for wearing an armband in protest of the Vietnam War. Richards had an extraordinary childhood in ultra-conservative Texas, where her civil rights attorney father and activist mother taught their kids to be troublemakers. She had a front-row seat to observe the rise of women in American politics and watched her mother, Ann, transform from a housewife to an electrifying force in the Democratic party. As a young woman, Richards worked as a labor organizer alongside women earning minimum wage, and learned that those in power don’t give it up without a fight. She experienced first-hand the misogyny, sexism, fake news, and the ever-looming threat of violence that constantly confront women who challenge authority. Now, after years of advocacy, resistance, and progressive leadership, she shares her “truly inspiring” (Redbook) story for the first time—from the joy and heartbreak of activism to the challenges of raising kids, having a life, and making change, all the while garnering a reputation as “the most badass feminist EVER” (Teen Vogue). In the “powerful and infinitely readable” (Gloria Steinem) Make Trouble, Richards reflects on the people and lessons that have gotten her through good times and bad, and encourages the rest of us to take risks, make mistakes, and make trouble along the way.

A unique story about first—and last—loves from the celebrated and bestselling author of We All Looked Up. Parker Santé hasn’t spoken a word in five years. While his classmates plan for bright futures, he skips school to hang out in hotels, killing time by watching the guests. But when he meets a silver-haired girl named Zelda Toth, a girl who claims to be quite a bit older than she looks, he’ll discover there just might be a few things left worth living for.