The Summer People
Kelly Link
Available as eBook
The Summer People is a story taken from Kelly Link’s latest collection, Get in Trouble. It showcases her fantastic, fantastical writing at its very best.
Kelly Link’s new collection of stories explores 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…
The Summer People is a bite-sized sample of Link’s incomparable writing, telling the story of Fran, her friend Ophelia, and their adventures at the house belonging to the mysterious and rarely glimpsed ‘summer people’. As the tales Fran tells about the house and its inhabitants become ever stranger and more magical, it gets harder and harder to tell what is real and what exists only in her imagination, and the lines between truth and fantasy become deliciously blurred.
“Praise for GET IN TROUBLE‘Very much fun”
Margaret Atwood, Twitter
See more reviews
“Kelly Link is inimitable. Her tales 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 unexpected. The most marvelous kind of trouble to get in”
Erin Morgenstern
“Link’s stories are always a treat, and Get In Trouble contains some of her best writing yet. Richly imagined, intellectually teasing: these are not so much small fictions as windows on to entire worlds. A brilliant, giddying read”
Sarah Waters
“Every one of the stories in this collection is like a one-of-a-kind Jack-in-the-box. We turn the crank, expecting the laughter, the surprise, the rearrangement of themes familiar to our ears from ages ago, and the turning brings us all those joys. But wait, wait until the box pops open: out comes not Jack nor the weasel but our own exposed hearts. How does Kelly Link understand our pains and longings and memories and even our futures so well, and how does she make us go back to the next Jack-in-the-box, again and again, with hope and dread and determination to know life better, to live differently? Kelly Link s a national treasure!”
Yiyun Li
“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. Another way to say this is: in these stories, Kelly Link is the top of her self-defined form. Another way to say it is: close your mouth and get out of the way, because here comes Kelly Link, than whom no one is better”
Peter Straub
Kelly Link
Kelly Link is the author of the collections Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, and Pretty Monsters. She and Gavin J. Grant have co-edited a number of anthologies, including multiple volumes of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and, for young adults, Monstrous Affections. She is the co-founder of Small Beer Press. Her short stories have been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Best American Short Stories, andPrize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. She has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Link was born in Miami, Florida. She currently lives with her husband and daughter in Northampton, Massachusetts.
www.kellylink.net