Book cover of White Cat, Black Dog

Book description

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…

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Why read it?

3 authors picked White Cat, Black Dog as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

There is no one else out there writing like Kelly Link! I love how she blends genres! I love the voice in each of these stories. The White Road might honestly be my favorite story I've ever read. There a little magic in here and a little scifi and a little horror and a little litfic, and it's so unbelievably unlike anything else I've ever read. If you love short stories, you can't sleep on Kelly Link's work...and this might be her best.

I have loved all of Kelly’s books, and White Cat, Black Dog has some of her strongest work yet.

These surreal short stories take their inspiration from fairy tales and folk tales, some well-known and others obscure. I was especially delighted by The White Cat’s Divorce and Skinder’s Veil. I really enjoyed how she brought many of these stories into the modern world, magnifying their sharp dark humour and making them strangely more relatable than I would have expected.

I think they are ideal bedtime reading when the lights are low and the covers are pulled up under your chin…

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…

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