Enchanting, mesmerizing, brilliant work.
Seven modern fairy tales by a master of the short form.
Link, who won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2018, has been publishing groundbreaking fiction since her first collection, Stranger Things Happen, came out in 2001. Troubling old, stale boundaries between literary and genre fiction, writing stories that sometimes lean into horror, sometimes into fantasy, and that never shy away from featuring zombies, Link has produced a body of work that is formally original and emotionally rich. Her new collection of fairy tales is no exception. Part of the pleasure here is watching Link reimagine stories we think we know. That’s the case in “The Game of Smash and Recovery,” a futuristic SF tale based on “Hansel and Gretel,” about a sister and brother living on an alien planet alongside vampires and Handmaids (creatures who are both vicious and ingenious) and waiting for their parents to return for them. Similarly, Link reworks “Snow-White and Rose-Red” into “Skinder’s Veil,” a story about a grad student hiding out in a borrowed cabin trying to finish his dissertation and being visited by two women named Rose White and Rose Red, who both sate and beguile him. Another pleasure is seeing Link update certain tropes. In her hands, the Grimms’ enchanted animals are still enchanted animals, but straight princes and princesses are fabulous gay men and lesbian professionals, the ominous woods are airports with endless delays or post-apocalyptic landscapes where people must travel with corpses to keep monsters at bay, characters enter enchanted states by eating gummies, and true horror is a clogged toilet. Most beguiling are the ways these stories complicate the older tales’ tidy conclusions: Is saving your lover from the Queen of Hell really noble if it means he will someday die from a disease? Is being feared by no one just as debilitating as fearing nothing? Is being brave worth the price? This is fiction that pulls you swiftly into its world and then holds you completely, lingering like an especially intense dream.
Enchanting, mesmerizing, brilliant work.Pub Date: March 28, 2023
ISBN: 9780593449950
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.
A love triangle among young literati has a long and complicated aftermath.
King’s narrator doesn’t reveal her name until the very last page, but Sam and Yash, the brainy stars of her 17th-century literature class, call her Jordan. Actually, at first they refer to her as Daisy, for Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby, but when they learn she came to their unnamed college on a golf scholarship, they change it to Jordan for Gatsby’s golfer friend. The boys are housesitting for a professor who’s spending a year at Oxford, living in a cozy, book-filled Victorian Jordan visits for the first time after watching The Deer Hunter at the student union on her first date with Sam. As their relationship proceeds, Jordan is practically living at the house herself, trying hard not to notice that she’s actually in love with Yash. A Baptist, Sam has an everything-but policy about sex that only increases the tension. The title of the book refers to a nickname for the king of hearts from an obscure card game the three of them play called Sir Hincomb Funnibuster, and both the game and variations on the moniker recur as the novel spins through and past Jordan’s senior year, then decades into the future. King is a genius at writing love stories—including Euphoria (2014), which won the Kirkus Prize—and her mostly sunny version of the campus novel is an enjoyable alternative to the current vogue for dark academia. Tragedies are on the way, though, as we know they must be, since nothing gold can stay and these darn fictional characters seem to make the same kinds of stupid mistakes that real people do. Tenderhearted readers will soak the pages of the last chapter with tears.
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780802165176
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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