I am a massive Kelly Link fan. Her latest book of short
stories is sold as "ingeniously
reinvented fairy tales that play out with astonishing consequences in the
modern world." Most of them do not stick closely to their original tales but
branch off in true original Link style.
Link describes the
fantastical as an 'intensifier' of realism and these stories manage to be
serious, playful, and hilarious all at once. Mixing realism, horror, fantasy
and sci-fi, reading them will take you on wild imaginative journeys full of
brilliant surprises, from cats running a cannabis farm to a house sitter who
must never let in the owner should he happen to call. My favourites are "The White Cat's Divorce" and "Skinder's Veil."
Seven modern fairytales from Pulitzer Prize finalist Kelly Link, featuring illustrations by award-winning artist Shaun Tan.
Leaving behind the enchanted castles, deep, dark woods and gingerbread cottages of fairytales for airport waiting rooms, alien planets and a cannabis farm run by a team of hospitable cats, White Cat, Black Dog offers a fresh take on the stories that you thought you knew.
Here you'll find stoner students, failing actors and stranded professors questing for love, revenge or even just a sense of purpose. Poised on the edges between magic, modernity and mundanity, White Cat, Black Dog will delight, beguile, occasionally…
Set
in icy Norway, about the friendship between two young girls, Siss and Unn, this
short novel was a revelation to me as a writer and as a reader.
Written in the
third-person, it has the immediacy of the first-person point of view, with the
broader viewpoint and detail that third-person allows. The characterisation and style blew me away
with its unique intensity. It’s the kind of book where you keep wondering how
the writer managed to describe a world so brilliantly.
It packs beauty, tragedy, and hope into a small space and left me breathless and inspired—a
masterpiece.
In rural Norway, one evening after school, 11-year-old Siss and Unn strike up a deep and unusual bond. When the next day Unn sets off into the wintry woods in search of a mysterious frozen waterfall, known locally as the "ice palace," and does not return, a devastated Siss takes it upon herself to find her missing friend. The Ice Palace is one of the most memorable achievements in modern literature thanks in large part to Vesaas's unique command of a sparse, figurative, and fragmentary style. As part of the new and improved Peter Owen Cased Classics series, this edition…
After reading M. John Harrison's brilliant genre-bending, The Sunken Land
Begins to Rise Again, I was eager for more. I came across Climbers
during a drawn-out respiratory illness, when I became obsessed with watching
climbing films and documentaries. You don't have to be a climber yourself to
love this book: my fear of heights prevents me from scaling even a low rock
face.
Although an ostensibly realist book, Harrison nonetheless weaves a
strangeness into his writing at the sentence level. His descriptions of
tarnished landscapes are second to none, and his eccentric characters have
sunken permanently into my psyche, especially the startling Sankey.
Described
as a "genre contrarian," he is also famous for writing fantasy and
science fiction, stamped with his inimitable style.
'No one alive can write sentences like he can. He's the missing evolutionary link between William Burroughs and Virginia Woolf' Olivia Laing
'Among the most brilliant novelists writing today' Robert Macfarlane
'Truly gets to the heart of that strange, indefinable otherness of the wild northern landscape' Benjamin Myers
Retreating from the ruins of his marriage, Mike leaves London for the wildness of the Yorkshire moors, where he falls in with a group of climbers - a band of misfits and mavericks bound by the pursuit of the unattainable: the perfect climb.
Travelling from abandoned urban quarries to misty, lichened crags,…
Ambitious and playful, darkly humorous and
exuberantly imaginative, these strikingly original, genre-bending literary
stories move effortlessly between the realistic and the fantastical as their
outsider characters explore what it’s like to be human in the twenty-first
century.
Whether about our relationship with the environment and animals,
technology, social media, loneliness, or the enormity of time, they reflect the
complexities of being alive. Beautifully written and compelling, you won’t read
anything else like them.
