Trampoline

by Kelly Link (Editor)

Twenty astounding stories by Karen Joy Fowler, Glen Hirshberg, Samantha Hunt, Shelley Jackson, Rosalind Palermo Stevenson, Greer Gilman, and more.

Genres: Short Stories, Fantasy, Anthologies, Fiction, Literary Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Literature

336 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2003

About the author

Kelly Link is an American author best known for her short stories, which span a wide variety of genres - most notably magic realism, fantasy and horror. She is a graduate of Columbia University.

Her stories have been collected in four books - Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, Pretty Monsters, and most recently, Get in Trouble.
She has won several awards for her short stories, including the World Fantasy Award in 1999 for "The Specialist's Hat", and the Nebula Award both in 2001 and 2005 for "Louise's Ghost" and "Magic for Beginners".

Link also works as an editor, and is the founder of independant publishing company, Small Beer Press, along with her husband, Gavin Grant.

Reviews

[Angela · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to dislike this book but I can't. I have a vague memory of buying it as a teenager (the cover, the inexplicably "random" title, and the feeling that I should read more short stories), and now, after finally getting around to reading it, I'm a little confused.

First of all, I have no idea who the editor is, or who any of the twenty contributing authors are, or the publisher. Secondly—and maddeningly—there is no introduction and all the author bios are nauseatingly ironic and edgy. As I read more of the stories, I formed the hypothesis that this anthology is something of a vanity project for a bunch of MFAs to get publication credits for their weird short stories. Alas, with no introduction, I will never know...

The stories in this collection are odd. Some are stylistically odd, some have strange subject matter, and some are a little from column A and a little from column B. I enjoyed a decent amount of the stories; however, I found many of them to be merely average, with the exception of "A Crowd of Bones" which is one of the worst pieces of fiction I have ever read, and is solely to blame for why it took me so long to slog through this book.

I rarely read collections featuring more than one author, so I'm curious to see whether or not my 3-star rating will match up with the ratings for each individual story.

"The Force Acting on the Displaced Body" (2/5)
A man builds a "boat" out of corks to sail from Kentucky to Paris. Maps and names.

"Well-Moistened with Cheap Wine, the Sailor and the Wayfarer Sing of Their Absent Sweethearts" 3/5
A group of Tinas study Chinese dialect symbols and attempt to give meaning to the ideograms. Weird lesbian stuff and goddess delusions.

"Angel" 4/5
Taxidermy, animal cruelty, dead boy's body, art theory, masturbating.

"Impala" 1/5
VR prizefighting, hacking, gambling, AI to simulate a child, murder. Extremely irritating style (see: AI to simulate a child).

"Famous Men: Three Stories" 4/5
Fable-like. Interesting ideas.

"A Crowd of Bone" 0/5
A story that makes no goddamn sense. Wannabe old-timey language ("thou dost...") and so many sentence fragments. Characters, places, and lore with no context. Nearly impossible to discern any plot...witches and a contrived love story/pregnancy?

"Fuming Woman" 4/5
A trapeze artist is transmigrated during a performance. Surreal and light existentialism.

"Eight-Legged Story" 3.5/5
Story of a blended family, told in eight parts.

"The King of Spain" 1/5
The protagonist has cancer and uses it as an excuse to be an asshole drunk. Also, for no apparent reason he has a pet monkey that defecates on everything.

"Bumpship" 4/5
Space colonization. Capitalism > human rights.

"The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet" 3.5/5
Exactly what it sounds like.

"Shipwreck Beach" 2.5/5
A 23-year-old ex-convict convinces his cousin to visit him in Hawaii. All characters, especially minor characters, are annoying.

"The Yellow Chamber" 2/5
Post-modern story about "probability researchers." The quack scientist invents a machine that invents him. So meta.

"Destroyer"5/5
I loved this story so much but I don't want to write anything down, because I would love to forget it and re-read it as if it were the first time.

"God and the Three Wishes" 3.5/5
Fable-like (with a shitload of parentheses). Do things happen because of God or because of chance?

"Dead Boy Found" 2/5
Death and existentialism. Pretty boring and meaningless except for the last page.

"Insect Dreams" 2/5
17th century. A lepidopterist travels to Suriname for a field study. Subtext about slavery.

"Ash City Stomp" 4.5/5
A woman and her boyfriend go on a roadtrip and pick up a hitchhiker who is either the devil or someone who is pretending to be the devil. Characters are slightly fucked up for the sake of entertainment.

"King Rat" 1/5
Very short story about a kid who accidentally befriends one of her father's colleagues.


AVERAGE RATING: 2.25/5

[meeners · Rating 4 out of 5]

fantastic, strange collection with some really stand-out stories: "angel" (strange and creeeeeepy), "eight-legged story" (strangely resonated with me), "a crowd of bone" (strangest of the strange - and utterly beautiful), etc. the last story, by the always amazing karen joy fowler, was strange because it wasn't strange. and it made me cry.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet so much that I tracked down a copy of Vandana Singh's short story collection of the same name from the U.K. I read a few other stories but Singh's really stood out.

[Sue Chant · Rating 2 out of 5]

Short stories. Generally OK, some poor, none outstanding.
Christopher Rowe, The Force Acting on the Displaced Body
Ed Park, Well-Moistened with Cheap Wine, the Sailor and the Wayfarer Sing of Their Absent Sweethearts
Shelley Jackson, Angel
John Gonzalez, Impala
Samantha Hunt, Famous Men (Three Stories)
Alex Irvine, Gus Dreams of Biting the Mail Man
Greer Gilman, A Crowd of Bone
Alan DeNiro, Fuming Woman
Maureen McHugh, Eight-Legged Story
Dave Shaw, King of Spain
Susan Mosser, Bump Ship
Vandana Singh, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet
Glen Hirshberg, Shipwreck Beach
Jeffrey Ford, The Yellow Chamber
Beth Adele Long, Destroyer
Carol Emshwiller, Gods and Three Wishes
Christopher Barzak, Dead Boy Found
Rosalind Palermo Stevenson, Insect Dreams
Richard Butner, Ash City Stomp
Karen Joy Fowler, King Rat

[P. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hit or miss, with no one story knocking my socks off, but enough with enough meat that I read almost all of them. I skipped the 2 longest that had the most poetic, flowery language.

[Joseph · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hard to write a review of a collection of stories from different authors, as there's such a difference in quality. The longer stories tended to be the weakest; I couldn't even finish Jackson's insufferable, interminable "Crowd of Bone", and "Insect Dreams" was a slog, despite a good premise and setting. Both writers seemed far too in love with their own words, and the storytelling and characterization suffered as a result. The science fiction pieces seemed to be the strongest. I liked "Impala" a lot; Gonzalez did a great job of world-building without spelling out too much. "Bumpship" wasn't quite as subtly elegant, but still interesting.

In general, I guess I felt that most of these stories were a bit half-baked. Not so much that they needed to be longer, so much as they needed to be more complete, if that makes any sense. Take "Ash City Stomp", for example, which tells the story of a road trip with the devil. It's a great premise, and executed with aplomb, as the devil seemingly does very little, but the world still goes to shit around him. But then the story just kind of ends, hinting at a possibility without really bothering to weigh in, to make a tough choice.

Maybe this goes for the book as a whole, as well. I wanted to read it because it was edited by Kelly Link, whose books I've enjoyed before, but the book doesn't include a story by her, or even so much as an introduction. The blurb on the back hints at some organizing principle, but it would have been nice if Link, or anyone for that matter, had bothered to flesh that idea out.

[Javi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very heterogeneous stories, a few resonate with me a lot, the rest don't.

[Rand · Rating 5 out of 5]

Your consciousness is like a trampoline.

Sometimes it is best to sit and watch and wait awhile, other times it is better to enter and jump within the bounds that are allotted to you by the rubrics of a science you gleefully disregard by sheer force of play.

Attempts to remove children from the trampoline are done so under the penalty of death. Forgiveness is always possible if you remain possible. Because love rebounds as much as it binds.

Whatever you do do on the trampoline, keep it clean. And if you can't keep it clean, let it rain. Your conscience bounces off of those you meet.

This book brings it all back, manifold, as a single surface with which to dip and leap from again and again.

[Michele Berger · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel lucky to have been introduced to several new authors whose work I didn't know including: Beth Adele Long, Shelly Jackson, John Gonzalez, Carol Emshwiller and Vandana Singh to name just a few. The stories took risks both in terms of subject matter and format. Many stuck with me after reading them. There were just two stories that I found were very difficult to read and not appealing. Overall very enjoyable.

[Gisele Walko · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am a huge Kelly Link fan so I was excited to read the Trampoline anthology, and this collection of short stories does not disappoint. My favorite was about the woman who thought she was a planet, but many of the others are fantastic as well. This was the original and well written collection that I thought it would be. If you're into weird stuff, check it out.

Gisele Walko- author of Wolf Girl finds necRomance.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Published less than eight years ago in Small Beer Press' second year, This is in retrospect, a fascinating snapshot of what I privately think of as the "Wiscon Moment" when a group of promising young writers and editors and the authors they admired coalesced around that annual Memorial Day weekend convention.

[Dale · Rating 1 out of 5]

per friend (MLM) 09.17.2016 recommendation...; an anthology: I simply could not get into these stories; I tried three, finished one, put it down; as per my well respected reader friend MLM; purchased paperback via Robie Books, Berea, KY

[Don]

Just got this in the mail and bumped it up near the top of the reading queue.

[Fusako · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shelly Jackson って、こんな絵も描く人だったの！？
いとおしくなる一冊。

[Tim Storm · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite the mix. Some were a little too cute and self-conscious; others in this collection were a lot of fun.

[Cathy]

Note to self: requested because of Vandana Singh's story after reading her story in Hieroglyph.