Free fiction: Kelly Link's collection called "Magic for Beginners"

Kelly Link's collection "Magic for Beginners". [via Boing Boing]

Includes 2 Nebula Award winning stories, but misses 2 stories from print edition.

My own experience has been limited to only one of her stories - "Most of My Friends are Two-Thirds Water" (not from this collection) - and it wasn't a happy one because of language used. But one story is no way of judging an author, & she seems to be a well-talked-about one.

Table of contents.

1. "The Hortlak"
2. "The Cannon"
3. "Stone Animals"
4. "Catskin"
5. "Some Zombie Contingency Plans"
6. "The Great Divorce"
7. "Lull"

Kelly Link's "Most Of My Friends Are Two-Thirds Water": An "unsuccessful" love story

I picked up Link's collection "Stranger Things Happen" after seeing a well known sf author mention her name in the same breath as Ted Chiang - two of the hottest names in modern short fiction. It's unfair to judge an author by a single story, but this specific story - the only one I've read yet by Link - doesn't even approach the best of Chiang.

It's great prose, & not-bad light reading of read-once-and-forget variety. You might have seen the plot in a dozen movies: two long time friends of opposite sex, keep claiming they are just friends & not lovers, & yet something is there below the surface. In movies, they usually accept their loverness near climax, here they don't.

This is a non-genre story, in spite of well-known sf authors' names thrown in, a mention of outer planets, & many mentions of aliens.

This is not your story if reading about sex bothers you. While it is not porn, it does sometimes get graphic.

Fact sheet.

"Most Of My Friends Are Two-Thirds Water", short story, review
First published: Kelly's collection "Stranger Things Happen" in 2001.
Rating: B