The Fabulist in the Woods

In Northampton with Kelly Link and her community of like-minded writers.

- LILA SHAPIRO

KELLY LINK LIVES in a yellow farmhouse in Northampton with her husband, the editor Gavin J. Grant, and their 14-year-old daughter, Ursula. They have a Labradoodle named Koko and, out back, six chickens named after dragons and fonts: Toothless, Falkor, Fafnir, Midgard Serpent, Bembo, and Chancery. When I arrived on a snowy night in January, she offered me wool slippers and tea. "I'm an absolute hobbit," she said-a creature fond of a warm hearth and a quiet evening at home. We settled at the kitchen table beside a potted sweet-potato vine that had sprouted in the pantry. "I didn't have the heart to..." She petted the leaves. "It was so determined."

In the stories of Kelly Link, strange things happen in otherwise ordinary settings. A teenage girl from Iowa travels to New York to find an older guy she met online and ends up at a hotel hosting a pair of conventions: one for dentists and one for superheroes. A girl from the Boston area discovers a lost world preserved inside her grandmother's old handbag (which is made from the skin of a dog that lives inside it). Her stories do not abide by the rules of conflict and resolution-they make sense in the way that dreams make sense. Pressed to explain these phenomena, Link's characters tend to change the subject. "The mechanics of how I can speak are really of no great interest, and I'm afraid I don't really understand it myself, in any case," a talking cat insists in a story from Link's new collection, White Cat, Black Dog. Since 2001, Link has published four books of short stories, with the fifth-a series of unsettling retellings of classic fairy tales-out this month. For much of that time, she has worked in relative obscurity. Early reviewers were impressed by her originality, but she remained largely unknown outside of M.F.A. programs and fantasy circles. When her first book was published more than 20 years ago, serious literature, for the most part, meant one-pound tomes of psychological realism.