My road to publishing actually came through a colleague who connected me to my agent, and the faculty at Cornell was very supportive.

In the mess of moving from place to place, I skipped two grades in the space of one year.

When I was eight years old, I wrote a paragraph-long short story about a goat on my mother's hundred-pound, black-and-white-screen laptop. The story came about largely because I liked the way the word 'goat' looked on the page, but I decided then and there that I wanted to be a writer. That desire never changed.

What inspires me most to write is the act of traveling.

My mother always says that fear and pain are immediate, and that, when they're gone we're left with the concept, but not the true memory.

Kelly Link's prose is conveyed in details so startling and fine that you work up a sweat just waiting for the next sentence to land. This is why we read, crave, need, can't live without short stories.

I think the mythology of death really ran away with me when I was very young.