Get in Trouble

Stories

By: Kelly Link

Narrated by: Grace Experience, Robbie Daymond, Rebecca Lowman, Cassandra Campbell, Ish Klein, Susan Duerden, Kirsten Potter

Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins

Publisher's summary

FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A bewitching story collection from a writer hailed as “the most darkly playful voice in American fiction” (Michael Chabon) and “a national treasure” (Neil Gaiman).

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY BookPage • BuzzFeed • Chicago Tribune • Kirkus Reviews • NPR • San Francisco Chronicle • Slate • Time • Toronto Star • The Washington Post

Kelly Link has won an ardent following for her ability, with each new short story, to take readers deeply into an unforgettable, brilliantly constructed fictional universe. The nine exquisite examples in this collection show her in full command of her formidable powers. In “The Summer People,” a young girl in rural North Carolina serves as uneasy caretaker to the mysterious, never-quite-glimpsed visitors who inhabit the cottage behind her house. In “I Can See Right Through You,” a middle-aged movie star makes a disturbing trip to the Florida swamp where his former on- and off-screen love interest is shooting a ghost-hunting reality show. In “The New Boyfriend,” a suburban slumber party takes an unusual turn, and a teenage friendship is tested, when the spoiled birthday girl opens her big present: a life-size animated doll.

Hurricanes, astronauts, evil twins, bootleggers, Ouija boards, iguanas, The Wizard of Oz, superheroes, the Pyramids . . . These are just some of the talismans of an imagination as capacious and as full of wonder as that of any writer today. But as fantastical as these stories can be, they are always grounded by sly humor and an innate generosity of feeling for the frailty—and the hidden strengths—of human beings. In Get in Trouble, this one-of-a-kind talent expands the boundaries of what short fiction can do.

Read by a Full Cast:
“The Summer People”… read by Grace Experience Blewer
“I Can See Right Through You”… read by Kirby Heyborne
“Secret Identity”… read by Tara Sands
“Valley of the Girls”… read by Robbie Daymond
“Origin Story”… read by Rebecca Lowman
“The Lesson”… read by Cassandra Campbell
“The New Boyfriend”… read by Ish Klein
“Two Houses” … read by Susan Duerden
“Light” … read by Kirsten Potter


Praise for Get in Trouble

“Ridiculously brilliant . . . These stories make you laugh while staring into the void.”—The Boston Globe

“When it comes to literary magic, Link is the real deal: clever, surprising, affecting, fluid and funny.”—San Francisco Chronicle

©2015 Kelly Link (P)2015 Random House

Critic reviews

“Welcome to the fabulous mind of Kelly Link. . . . It has taken Link ten years to produce her new story collection, Get in Trouble, and it is just as brilliant as her last.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editor’s Choice)

“Marvelous . . . As a writer Kelly Link is possessed of many magical powers, but to me what’s most notable about her new collection, Get in Trouble, is its astonishing freedom. . . . Link knows there’s nothing she’s ‘supposed’ to do; her imaginative freedom is unmitigated by a need to counterbalance the weirdness with explanation.”—Meg Wolitzer, NPR

“Smashing . . . sensational . . . Each of these stories presents the reader with the same setup: Remain in your narrative comfort zone, or venture into Link’s uncharted sea of troubles. Come on. Live a little.”—O: The Oprah Magazine

Great stories, wildly uneven narrator quality

What did you love best about Get in Trouble?

The stories are imaginative, clever, and captivating.

Who was your favorite character and why?

Immy in The New Boyfriend. Relatable, believable as a teenage girl.

Who would you have cast as narrator instead of the narrators?

Complicated question. A few of the narrators were terrific. Some were fine. Some were really, really terrible. I only want to replace the terrible ones.

Clever, Surreal, Stylized

The stories are clever and at times hilarious, especially if you imagine sentences taken out of context. The multiple narrators (one for each story) have very distinctive voices, which in some but not all cases serve the story well. If you like stylized stories and narration with a tilt to the surreal, you'll enjoy the book, as I did.

Slow to start

It was really Boring. Wasn’t what I had expected. I guess I could exchange for a better one. Hopefully.

Lovely collection

Fantastic, only reason it’s not 5 stars is because I don’t like questions left unanswered or stories feeling incomplete.

Get in Trouble - Confusing Fictional Narratives

Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?

Get in Trouble was not the best use of my Audible credit... here is why:

What was most disappointing about Kelly Link’s story?

Some of the short stories seemed to pick up out of no where and end in the middle of something,never really getting to a solid point. Because I listened to rather than read the stories, I often got lost or confused in the narratives (explained below) and was not entirely sure what was going on. There were a couple of stories that dealt with some very interesting topics--like the one with the drowned baby-- and some which had some humor--like the vampire/dentist convention one. Overall, the stories seemed to have potential, but they were introduced and concluded too quickly, with some random and strange topics I did not find completely relatable.

What about the narrators’s performance did you like?

There were multiple narrators, some of them seemed a little too monotone in their narration (which caused me to lose focus and ended up in my getting lost in the story) while other seemed to give the story appropriate dimension.

Review from the New Yorker wasn’t wrong

This is an amazing writer. Will be exploring more by this author. Also- I am over 40 years old.

Very entertaining

Loved these short stories. Dark, whimsical and very entertaining. Definitely will listen again in the future. Only down side is- I wish that all of these stories where full novels.

I didn't want them to end

Kelly link takes you into another world where you find yourself accepting the strange realities she hands you. both whimsical and dark, I'm hoping for a novel soon

avoid this if you are over 40 years old

I kept trying to find a way to like this but this was not written or narrated for people over 40 years old. I had the same reaction to this book as to video games, molly and vaping: disgusted befuddlement.

Maybe reading it would be better?

The performance is so boring, made the book so hard to finish. I could not get invested in any of the stories.