Short Stories Are Hard to Resist: A Guest Post from Kelly Link
As a reader, writer, and bookseller, Kelly Link has a keen sense of what excites people and keeps readers coming back for more. She has a knack for taking epic moments and scaling them down, making them feel intimate, and allowing the reader to feel like an integral part of the story. With her talent for taking snippets of life and creating weird worlds that feel so immense, it isn’t hard to see why she’s acclaimed as a master of the short story. Here’s Kelly Link, in her own words.
Paperback $18.00
White Cat, Black Dog
White Cat, Black Dog
By
Kelly Link
Illustrator
Shaun Tan
In Stock Online
Paperback $18.00
An author who can deliver a whole beginning, middle, and end of a story with a full gut punch in under 100 pages isn’t easy to come by. Kelly Link’s wonderfully weird collection of twisted fairy tales and modern retellings of gothic folklore provides readers with the perfect blend of an intimate slice of life within a surreal world of absurdity.
An author who can deliver a whole beginning, middle, and end of a story with a full gut punch in under 100 pages isn’t easy to come by. Kelly Link’s wonderfully weird collection of twisted fairy tales and modern retellings of gothic folklore provides readers with the perfect blend of an intimate slice of life within a surreal world of absurdity.
I wasn’t supposed to write the short stories that make up White Cat, Black Dog. I was supposed to be writing a novel. But short stories are hard to resist, especially when you’re five years into your first novel, and you’ve only gotten as far as the soggy middle ground of the first draft. You think, “Wouldn’t it be nice if I wrote something I could finish in a week or two?” And, so, once in a while I would guiltily, happily, set aside the work I was supposed to be doing.
I’d been thinking about Daniel Lavery’s wonderful fairy tale-inflected collection The Merry Spinster, and Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Sabrina Orah Mark’s fairy tale essays in The Paris Review (recently collected in Happily), in part because I’d been asked by a curator at a gallery if I would be willing to write a fairy tale to go along with an exhibition of contemporary art. I decided that I would revisit Madame D’Aulnoy’s “The White Cat,’” but in a sideways fashion, using the original story as a kind of spine, while allowing myself to come up with the meat and the skin of the new story in whatever way seemed most interesting. After writing “The White Cat’s Divorce,” it felt natural to follow the same loose rule for each new story — to have some connective tissue to a fairy tale that interested me, but to allow the points of connection to be as obscure or as tangential (or as straightforward) as each story seemed to require. Each story in my collection has a subtitle in parenthesis which tells you what fairy tale I drew on, but my hope is that some readers might even slip right past the subtitle and never know the fairy tale that served as its starting place.
I finished the first solid draft of my novel around the same time that I wrote the last new story for this collection, “Prince Hat Underground.” The original fairy tale “Prince Hat Underground” is a variation on “East of the Sun, West of the Moon,” a favorite since childhood of both mine and my editor’s, and I have to admit that when I wrote my version, I felt that I could quite happily go on producing fairy tales — that the language, and patterns, and imagery of fairy tales is the air that I have been breathing and the water that I’ve been swimming in ever since I first began to write.
Fairy tales have never been solely for children. They are for all readers who require a dose of wonder, of delight, of strangeness, or a reminder that there are moments in which people might try to do their best, even in the face of monsters or danger or their own worst impulses. Not every story is for every reader — but I hope that at least one or two of these is for you.
