White Cat, Black Dog: Stories

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE • "The Brothers Grimm meet Black Mirror meets Alice in Wonderland. . . . In seven remixed fairy tales, Link delivers wit and dreamlike intrigue."-Time

"Thought-provoking and wonderfully told . . . so seamlessly entwines the real with the surreal that the stories threaten to slip into reality, resonating long after reading."-BuzzFeed

A new collection from one of today's finest short story writers, MacArthur "Genius Grant" fellow Kelly Link, bestselling author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Get in Trouble-featuring illustrations by award-winning artist Shaun Tan

Finding seeds of inspiration in the stories of the Brothers Grimm, seventeenth-century French lore, and Scottish ballads, Kelly Link spins classic fairy tales into utterly original stories of seekers-characters on the hunt for love, connection, revenge, or their own sense of purpose.

In "The White Cat's Divorce," an aging billionaire sends his three sons on a series of absurd goose chases to decide which child will become his heir. In "The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear," a professor with a delicate health condition becomes stranded for days in an airport hotel after a conference, desperate to get home to her wife and young daughter, and in acute danger of being late for an appointment that cannot be missed. In "Skinder's Veil," a young man agrees to take over a remote house-sitting gig for a friend. But what should be a chance to focus on his long-avoided dissertation instead becomes a wildly unexpected journey, as the house seems to be a portal for otherworldly travelers-or perhaps a door into his own mysterious psyche.

Twisting and turning in astonishing ways, expertly blending realism and the speculative, witty, empathetic, and never predictable-these stories remind us once again of why Kelly Link is incomparable in the realm of short fiction.

Editorial Reviews

"Kelly Link is the master of the modern fairy tale."-Today

"White Cat, Black Dog [is] the perfect opportunity to get to know one of America's most inventive, evocative writers."-Slate

"Kelly Link is something of a short story sorceress."-The Washington Post

"To read Link is to place oneself in the hands of an expert illusionist, entering a world where nothing is ever quite what it seems."-The New Yorker

"As intense, absorbing and weird as the best dreams."-The Guardian

"[Stories of] sparkling strangeness."-The Wall Street Journal

"Kelly Link . . . masterfully twists familiar source material into unexpected, new shapes. . . . She beckons us into her gingerbread house in the cul-de-sac suburbs, hoping to entangle and provoke us. . . . For Link, modern literature can never outgrow the resilience and resonance of the fairy tale. And even if it could, what fun would that be?"-The Atlantic

"Kelly Link secures her crown as queen of the literary fairy tale. . . . Again and again, Link applies her fairy tales like a nutcracker to our contemporary archetypes, breaking them open and making us shiver with mingled horror and delight at the tiny and unsettling wonders she finds within."-Vox

"There are, of course, other authors adept at blending the real and the unreal, but there may well be no one who does it as impressively as Link."-The Boston Globe

"Like magic, narrative rearranges the world through words, and Kelly Link is one of modern fiction's boldest alchemists."-Electric Lit

"White Cat, Black Dog marks a glittering new height in the literature of the weird."-The Spectator (UK)

"Fans of Station Eleven, speculative fiction or simply anyone who needs a brief escape from the hard, cold world will find the ...

Readers Top Reviews

Julie StielstraMa

In "White Cat, Black Dog," Kelly Link has crafted a literally wonder-ful collection of stories for the delectation of lovers of folklore and fairy tales, replete with wit, imagination, and humanity. Beneath the title of each of the seven stories, Link kindly tells us the name of the fairy tale which each is… Associated with? Inspired by? Linked to? She mostly sticks by the outlines of the traditional versions: a tyrannical king sending his sons out on absurd journeys; lovers separated by a vengeful witch or fairy; a troop of clever creatures outwitting evil ones, and so on. She adroitly adopts the soothing, almost incantatory voice of the storyteller… and then reshapes the story to drop it into a new context. The tyrannical king becomes a greedy and obscenely wealthy businessman and his youngest son finds his aid in a highly-advanced marijuana farm and production facility run by cats. The separated lovers are a gay couple hailing Uber to hit trendy bars, until one disappears; his loyal lover is led on the quest to find him by talking rats and an Icelandic snake (in an island country that has no snakes). The enchanted bride unexpectedly abandons her lover for the oligarch… but dispatches him in a final astutely manipulative stroke. Who could resist the forlorn and beautiful young man in gorgeous coat embroidered with the image of a tragically trapped fox, seeking only a young woman skillful enough to set the fox free and brave enough to hold onto him, no matter what? What seems to be a 19th-century troupe of itinerant actors are actually traversing a post-apocalyptic Tennessee landscape peopled by frightened survivors fending off murderous souls… Bremen town musicians? Really? Just when you think you know where you’re going, there is a disorienting turn, and you smile to yourself and think, Oh! Wait! That’s not what I thought… where is this going now? It’s a lot of fun to see the spice Link adds to these old recipes, stirring in absurdities, modern ennui, danger, heartbreak, fear, and affection. But then, that’s how these stories work, isn’t it? They are to be borrowed, stolen from, embellished, twisted and tweaked, and passed along from hand to hand to be savored. Angela Carter is a noted practitioner of this art. But Carter can be so lush, so lurid, so overripe as to seep into a surfeit of blood and detail. Link does not do this. Even in the less successful, overelaborate story “The Game of Smash and Recovery,” the Handmaid servant-creatures who “briskly” (what a perfect adverb here!) tear a vampire to shreds are also tender, clever, and protective. The scavenging cloaked vampires with “jellied skin” and “armies of teeth” also bow their long necks, dance, and “sing propitiatory songs.” They never tip over into sheer blood-and-guts horror grossness. Link is wry, she is often funny; her characters patronize massage therap...

JHarrisJulie Stie

I'm not convinced Kelly Link lives on the same plane of existence as many of the rest of us--certainly she doesn't think there. Nearly every encounter I have with one of her stories leaves me thinking that hers are unlike other stories... even others of hers. I went into this collection of fairy tale retellings with no idea of what to expect, and I was right! Link's writing often lives, if it calls any place home for long, at the place where weird fiction and literary fiction meet. This latest collection has seven stories with *some* connection to fairy tales, and though each begins both with its own title and the title of the tale it draws from in parentheses, the connection is clearer in some cases than others. Her adaptation of Tam Lin is the most straightforwardly identifiable in its relationship to the source material as well as being the most fatasy-esque (also it's utterly lovely). Several, while having a titular connection to one fairy tale, evoke multiple tales at once; East O the Sun, West O the Moon feels like an Orpheus tale as well as several others besides. A few use what seem at first like an altogether unrelated story to bring your attention to elements or dynamics you missed in the story as you were used to thinking of it (The White Cat's Divorce). A couple tales had connections to their source material that struck me as either tenuous at best or possibly as just having gone entirely over my head; both options seem equally likely. One tale, ostensibly based on the Grimm story about a boy who couldn't feel fear (I half-recall the title in German translating to the Boy Who Couldn't Shudder), was so esoteric that any real link to the original escaped me, although I enjoyed and was unsettled by reading it. The adaptation of Hansel and Gretel is a space science fiction story dedicated to Iain M. Banks that contains a sibling-like relationship and abandonment of said siblings, but otherwise nothing I could see that had any thematic or other ties to Hansel & Gretel. It was a damn good story, though, and I didn't mind it a bit. A word of caution for anyone who might be thinking that fairy tale-inspired short stories might be suited for kids: these probably aren't. There are references to recreational substance use and sex (I'm happy to report excellent queer rep). Overall, Kelly Link is a wonder, and one kind of had to figure that if she did a collection of stories inspired by fairy tales, they'd be weird stories that get under your skin, never anything predictable. A strange and delightful collection. Thanks to Netgalley and Random House for the ARC--my opinions are entirely my own.

D.BeyerJHarrisJul

...because it will give you a clue as to what you're in for. These stories are like grim fairy tales with a modern twist, are extremely entertaining, but short on satisfaction. Kind of like trying to figure out an abstract piece of art. Doesn't prevent you from admiring it.

TinyWandaD.BeyerJ

I've read all of her books and I think the consistent caveat that I have about her stories is they often end abruptly, as if she doesn't quite know how to end a story !!! But this collection, actually consists of stories with the beginning, middle and end ! ( Usually ) A+

C PerryTinyWandaD

Each short story takes you into a different world. It looks like ours, but is unique to the story. I enjoyed each one thoroughly.

Short Excerpt Teaser

The White Cat's Divorce

(The White Cat)

All stories about divorce must begin some other place, and so let us begin with a man so very rich, he might reach out and have almost any thing he desired, as well as many things that he did not. He had so many houses even his accountants could not keep track of them all. He had private planes and newspapers and politicians who saw to it that his wishes became laws. He had orchards, islands, baseball teams, and even a team of entomologists whose mandate was to find new species of beetles to be given variations on the rich man's name. (For if it was true that God loved beetles, was it not true He loved the rich man even more? Was his good fortune not the proof of this?)

The rich man had all of this and more than I have space to write. Anything you have ever possessed, know that he had this, too. And if he did not, he could have paid you whatever your price was in order to obtain it.

All men desire to be rich; no man desires to grow old. To stave off old age, the rich man paid for personal trainers and knee replacements and cosmetic procedures that meant he always had a somewhat wide-eyed look, as if he were not a man in his seventies at all but rather still an infant who found his life a cascade of marvelous and surprising events. The rich man had follicular unit transplantation and special creams to bleach age spots. For dinner, his personal chefs served him fish and berries and walnuts as if he were a bear and not a rich man at all. Every morning, he swam two miles in a lake that was kept by an ingenious mechanism at a comfortable temperature for him throughout the year. In the afternoons, he had blood transfusions from adolescent donors, these transfusions being a condition of the scholarships to various universities that the rich man funded. In the evenings, he threw lavish parties, surrounding himself with people who were young and beautiful. As he grew older, his wives grew younger, and in this way, for a time, the rich man was able to persuade himself that he, too, was still young and might remain so forever.

But although a man may acquire younger and ever more beautiful wives who will maintain the pretense that he, too, is still untouched by age, this rich man had, a long time ago, been married to a first wife, and this first wife had had three sons. The three sons, having been raised with every advantage by caregivers and tutors and therapists and life coaches paid to adhere to the best principles of child-rearing, were attractive, personable, and in every way the kind of children that a father could have regarded with satisfaction. And yet the rich man did not regard them with satisfaction. Instead, when he looked at his three sons, the youngest of whom was now nineteen, he saw only the proof of his own mortality. It is difficult to remain young when one's children selfishly insist upon growing older.

To make matters worse, his sons were all in residence at the house where the rich man was spending the winter. The eldest was in the middle of an acrimonious divorce (his first) and the second was hiding out from the media, while the third had no good reason at all, except that he truly loved his father and wished for his approval. (Also, he had flunked out of university.) Everywhere the rich man turned, a son was underfoot.

At night, he began to be visited by a certain dream. In this dream, the rich man was troubled first by the notion that he had a fourth child. And in the dream, no sooner had he had this notion than he became aware that this fourth child, too, was a guest in the house, and although in the morning the rich man found he could never remember what this child looked like-Was it small or tall? Was it long and slender or so enormous it blotted out its surroundings? What was the sound of its voice?-he knew this last child was Death. In the dream, the rich man offered his child Death all he had in return for more life, but nothing the rich man had to offer was of interest to Death. The only thing Death desired was the company of its father.

Sometimes the rich man had this dream three or four times in one night. By day, he began to detest the sight of his sons.

At last, in perplexity, the rich man turned to consultants to assist him with the problem of his sons, and by the end of the week, a most elegant plan had been put in place. The rich man, in accordance, summoned his three sons to his side. Once he had embraced them lovingly and they had discussed the news of the day and the foundations and boards of which his sons were nominally the heads, he said, "My sons: although it is true that I am in my prime, and although I know it pains you to contemplate, a day must come whe...

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