Kelly Link on Jessica Knoll, 'The White Mosque,' and The Book That Made Her Laugh Out Loud

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Welcome to Shelf Life, ELLE.com’s books column, in which authors share their most memorable reads. Whether you’re on the hunt for a book to console you, move you profoundly, or make you laugh, consider a recommendation from the writers in our series, who, like you (since you’re here), love books. Perhaps one of their favorite titles will become one of yours, too.

She may prefer talking about books to writing them, but Kelly Link is pretty good at both. As the author of five short story collections, she’s been a Pulitzer Prize and Kirkus Prize for Fiction finalist, MacArthur Fellow, National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient and has won among other awards, the Nebula, Hugo, Bram Stoker, Shirley Jackson, World Fantasy, and O’Henry awards. Now, after a decades-long lit career comes her debut novel, The Book of Love (Random House). As for talking up books, she’s the cofounder of indie bookstore Book Moon abd copublisher of Small Beer Press (both with her husband, Gavin Grant), contributor to Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet zine, reader for scifiction.com, and editor of horror and fantasy anthologies (horror and fairy tales are favorite genres) and for The Greensboro Review.

The Miami-born, Western-Massachusetts-based Link keeps six chickens named after dragons and fonts, has a tattoo of the word “skin” (part of a Shelley Jackson project), teaches at and is an alumna of Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop (she earned an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro), amassed a collection of cookbooks from working at Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop in Boston, has written erotic fan fiction based on The Great Gatsby, grew up among a large collection of musicals, and once won a 6-month trip around the world.

Likes: cats (but is allergic) and superstitions, Curious George hatboxes and ghost stories. Dislikes: bad weather, TV (unless there’s a vampire in it). Healthy attitude toward: Bad reviews on Goodreads and karaoke. Sink your teeth into her book recs below.

The book that:

…kept me up way too late:

Melinda Taub’s The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennett, Witch is a generous, funny, fantastical extension of Pride and Prejudice. I started reading it late one night (my favorite time to read is long after everyone else in the house is asleep), and couldn’t put it down until nearly 4 a.m. and even then, I only stopped reading because I loved it so much I wanted to have some left over for the next day.

…I recommend over and over again:

I own an independent bookstore, and making recommendations is the best part of the job. I can’t possibly go with just one, though, so here are three. Molly Gloss’s gorgeous historical novel The Hearts of Horses is about a woman who goes from ranch to ranch, breaking horses. It’s my go-to recommendation for anyone who has fallen out of love with reading. For non-fiction, Sofia Samatar’s The White Mosque is a luminous exploration of personal and cultural history. And for horror fans, Christopher Buehlman’s The Lesser Dead is a recent favorite: a grimy, twisty, propulsive vampire novel set in the 70s.

...I read in one sitting, it was that good:

Jessica Knoll’s Bright Young Women is wonderful and nerve wracking. She draws from the sorority house murders committed by Ted Bundy, but chooses to focus on the women – those murdered, and those who survive. It’s an act of triumphant, restorative storytelling.

…currently sits on my nightstand:

So many! But two that I’m particularly excited to read are Ed Parks’s Same Bed Different Dreams, and a galley of Bora Chung’s Your Utopia.

…made me laugh out loud:

I laughed so hard it hurt, reading Allie Brosh’s Hyperbole and a Half. The four collections of Oglaf, an extremely risqué webcomic that lovingly satirizes the tropes of fantasy, are also laugh-out-loud excellent.

…I’d like turned into a TV show:

I would love to see someone make Dorothy Dunnett’s swashbuckling, globe-spanning historical series Lymond Chronicles into a TV show.

...has the best opening line:

I will always be a sucker for the first sentence in Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle: “I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.”

…has a sex scene that will make you blush:

The Book of Love is my love letter to the romance genre even if, strictly speaking, it isn’t a romance novel. But if I can be an evangelist for one romance writer, it would probably be Laura Kinsale, whose romances are beautifully written, super hot, and often have outrageously screwball premises. For example, the hot duke in Flowers from the Storm has a stroke and loses access to language, while falling hard for a Quaker who uses “thee” and “thou” when she speaks. Their conversations might easily have become clumsy in lesser hands, but instead they’re heartfelt and moving.

…is a master class on dialogue:

Every single Grace Paley short story is a master class on dialogue. I read her whenever I need to wake the most essential part of myself awake, that part that loves language and loves people and how they use language – obliquely, conversationally, to convey emotion and delight and heartbreak and everything else.

…describes a house I’d want to live in or a place I’d want to visit:

I’m surprised by how much I enjoyed contemplating this question. Tempting to say Hill House, in The Haunting of Hill House, but in the end I’ll have to go with Bilbo Baggins’s hobbit hole. It just seems so cozy.

...I consider literary comfort food:

Every single one of Laurie Colwin’s novels. It’s reductive to say this, I realize, but of all the 20th century writers I’ve read, she’s the nearest thing to Jane Austen. She pins her characters to a velvet board the way a collector pins a moth, but with infinite love and tenderness.

…I would have blurbed if asked:

Every single T. Kingfisher novel I’ve ever read. I describe her horror novels as John Bellairs for adults. They’re fun, replete with likable, kooky characters who follow their own hearts, and they’re never too scary – just scary enough.

...everyone should read:

I’ve been saying this for a while, but I wish everyone would read Megan Giddings’s The Women Could Fly. It takes place in an alternate version of the U.S. in which some women are witches, and therefore all women are closely monitored. It feels painfully relevant to the politics of the world that we live in, but it’s also a moving exploration of family, friendship, love, and identity.

...that holds the recipe to a favorite dish:

Decades ago, I visited a friend who had made the Irish Oatmeal Cake with butterscotch frosting from the Moosewood Restaurant Book of Desserts. It was so life changingly good that I immediately bought the cookbook, and it’s my go-to dessert whenever I want to celebrate someone, or make an acquaintance think that I have any talent for baking.

Bonus question: If I could live in any library or bookstore in the world, it would be:

I think I’d pick Atlantis Books on the island of Santorini. Books and the sea and access to taramasalata! What more could I need?

The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch

Bright Young Women

The Women Could Fly

The Hearts Of Horses

The White Mosque

Same Bed Different Dreams

I Capture the Castle

Your Utopia

Hyperbole and a Half

The Lesser Dead

Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles

What Moves the Dead

The Hobbit

Home Cooking

The Haunting of Hill House

The Collected Stories

Flowers from the Storm

Moosewood Restaurant Book of Desserts

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