White Cat, Black Dog

October 1, 2022

Featuring a knockout 15 stories, seven focused on a married couple across decades, international star Atwood's Old Babes in the Wood examines love and relationships, loss and memory in her first collection since 2014's Stone Mattress. In Ten Planets, award-winning Mexican author Herrera conjoins sf, noir, and the meditative aspects of Jorge Luis Borges's Fictions and Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics in short-short stories whose subjects range from sentient objects to a bacterium that gains consciousness after its host ingests a psychotropic drug (30,000-copy first printing). From Macarthur Fellow/Pulitzer Prize finalist Link, White Cat, Black Dog offers seven reimagined fairytales that illuminate the contemporary world, with stories including a woman in poor health stranded at an airport and a billionaire putting his sons through absurd tasks to see which should be his heir.

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Starred review from January 9, 2023
Link (Get in Trouble) refashions classic fairy tales, myths, and adventure sagas for contemporary settings in her wondrous collection. In “The White Cat’s Divorce,” a wealthy father sends his three sons on a series of quests to decide who will win his estate. Along the way, the sons wind up under the spell of an enterprising feline who runs a weed dispensary. A company of traveling actors finds peril in a curiously vacant Virginia town in “The White Road.” In “Prince Hat Underground,” a hapless man undertakes an epic journey to rescue his missing husband from the Queen of Hell. Hansel and Gretel get the sci-fi treatment on a planet of vampires in “The Game of Smash and Recovery.” And in “Skinder’s Veil,” a house-sitter is visited by figures out of storybooks. Link delivers the kind of off-the-cuff oddness her readers expect, and her reworkings take the clockwork of familiar stories and give them bloody, beating hearts. She makes great leaps in her prose, too, often framing her tales with time-hardened lines like “All of this happened a very long time ago,” before fashioning a startling new simile, as with the sensation of one character’s attention on others feeling like “sunlight coming through a magnifying glass.” This is enchanting. Agent: Renee Zuckerbrot, Renee Zuckerbrot Literary Agency.

February 15, 2023
In her first collection since Get in Trouble (2015), Link uses fairy tales as a jumping-off point for seven stories that explore human connection. In ""The White Cat's Divorce,"" the youngest son of a wealthy man participates in a competition set up by his father to see which of his sons will become his heir. In his quest to fulfill his father's increasingly outlandish requests, he comes across a house full of sentient cats, led by a lovely white cat who might be the answer to winning his father's contest. ""Prince Hat Underground"" finds Gary searching for his enchanting husband, Prince Hat, who Gary learns has been stolen away by his original fianc�e, none other than the Queen of Hell herself. Gary undertakes a perilous journey down to Hell to see if he can wrest his husband back. The sf tale, ""The Game of Smash and Recovery,"" finds two siblings stranded on a distant planet playing a game that leads to a startling revelation for one of them. This eclectic offering is bound to please Link's many devotees.

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Starred review from February 15, 2023
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.

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