Magic for Beginners

by Kelly Link

Best of the Decade: Salon, The A.V. Club "If I had to pick the most powerfully original voice in fantasy today, it would be Kelly Link. Her stories begin in a world very much like our own, but then, following some mysterious alien geometry, they twist themselves into something fantastic and, frequently, horrific. You won't come out the same person you went in."-Lev Grossman, The Week "Highly original."-Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Dazzling."-Entertainment Weekly (grade: A, Editor's Choice) "Darkly playful."-Michael Chabon Best of the Year: Time Magazine, Salon, Boldtype, PopMatters. Kelly Link's engaging and funny stories riff on haunted convenience stores, husbands and wives, rabbits, zombies, weekly apocalyptic poker parties, witches, and cannons. Includes Hugo, Nebula, and Locus award winners. A Best of the Year pick from TIME, Salon.com, and Book Sense. Illustrated by Shelley Jackson. Kelly Link is the author of three collections of short fiction Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, and Pretty Monsters. Her short stories have won three Nebula, a Hugo, and a World Fantasy Award.
She was born in Miami, Florida, and once won a free trip around the world by answering the question "Why do you want to go through the world?" ("Because you can't go through it.") Link lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she and her husband, Gavin J. Grant, run Small Beer Press, co-edit the fantasy half of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and play ping-pong. In 1996 they started the occasional zine Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet.

• ISBN10: 1306465931
• ISBN13: 9781306465939
• Publish Date: 1 January 2005
• Publish Status: Active
• Out of Print: 14 April 2015
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Random House
• Format: eBook
• Language: English

Reviews

It's always hard to rate short story collections but these range from 3-5, including my favorite - the titular Magic for Beginners. I read it elsewhere in another multi-author collection and that's what turned me on to Kelly Link. The same layered story framing and whimsical approach to time, content, flow, etc are throughout.

[jamiereadthis]

I became a fan with Stranger Things Happen, but this book— this book is just something else. Where the former was quirky, endearing, wearing its precious little heart on its sleeve, this book takes it heads and shoulders above. The fantastical surrealism— whimsical before, now honed, now something altogether more— isn’t cutesy-cheeky; it’s spooky and powerful and devastating and delightful and sunk in a reality that makes the absurd all the more spine-tingling and hauntingly plausible.

Magic for Beginners is, truly, magic.