Pretty Monsters - Tapa dura

All of Link's stories are wonderfully odd and original . . . Very scary indeed. -- SARAH WATERS Kelly Link is the literary descendant of Jorge Luis Borges and Franz Kafka. * * AUDREY NIFFENEGGER * * Funny, moving, tender, brave and dangerous. She is unique, and should be declared a national treasure, and possibly surrounded at all times by a cordon of armed marines. * * NEIL GAIMAN * * Link's stories play in a place few writers go, a netherworld between literature and fantasy, Alice Munro and JK Rowling, and Link find truths there that most authors wouldn't dare touch. * * Time * * A new short story collection by Kelly Link ... and once more, for a little while, the world is worth saving. * * MICHAEL CHABON * * Intoxicating. These stories will come alive, put on zoot suits, and wrestle you to the ground. They want you and you will be theirs. * * ALICE SEBOLD * * Link's writing about relationships, whether between parents and children, friends, or young lovers, is sublime. The highlight is the Nebula award-winning "Magic for Beginners", about a group of friends hooked on a bizarre TV shoe set in a vast library. Like many others in the collection, it's coming-of-age story written with a tender insight into the unstable emotional geography of the teenage mind. -- Eric Brown * * Guardian * * Wizards, ghosts, meat-eating sofas and Nosferatu babysitters weave in and out of recognisable everyday life. Link's tone is cleverly poised between genuine creepiness and off-the-wall humour. Eccentric and unforgettable. -- Kate Saunders * * The Times * * Links Narrative come complete with ghost and fairies - her stories have been labeled as part of the 'New Weird' movement, but are no less human for that. -- Erica Wagner * * The Times * * Dark, sexy and hilarious. * * New Statesman * * Very odd, and very funny. * * Scotland on Sunday * *

Weird, wicked, spooky and delicious, Pretty Monsters is a book of tall tales to keep you up all night. Blending fairytale, fantasy, horror, myth and mischief in a delicious cocktail, Kelly Link creates a world like no other, where ghosts of girlfriends past rub up against Scrabble-loving grandmothers with terrifying magic handbags, wizards sit alongside morbid babysitters, and we encounter a people-eating monster who claims to have a sense of humour. Combining the imaginative brilliance of Borges with the madcap escapades of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and more than a pinch of macabre humour, this is writing to come back from the dead for.