Come on, is your heart a sponge or a fist?

Come on, is your heart a sponge or a fist?

I am very interested in place, and the influences of place on characters.

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

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

At the end of the day, despite all the other great things that literature does in society and in a person's life, I think that we read to escape. And I think that place, more than anything, provides that escape quickly, if an author is engaged with the place.

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.