This is not a trick.

There are two people for whom—no matter what public (or my own) opinion might say to the contrary—I will turn on the television and watch every single episode of every show they ever create: Aaron Sorkin and Joss Whedon. And between the two of them, they pretty much cover the range of what I find interesting in scripted television: all the way from ensemble-driven shows about small groups of multi-faceted characters and their internal dynamics, with smart, funny writing and a flair for metaphor, to ensemble-driven shows about small groups of multi-faceted characters and their internal dynamics, with smart, funny writing, and a flair for allegory…which also incorporate some element of the fantastical.

See, among other things, I read a lot of fantasy novels, and as much as I’m a fan of realism, there’s something about setting a story in a world that is different from our own—where the impossible can, and does, happen—that makes a story lighter for me. I don’t mean “lighter” in terms of the ideas the novels address, or what they hope to accomplish. I don’t mean that these books are necessarily lighter in tone or in impact. Instead, I think that by stepping outside of our own day-to-day lives, these books ask us to shed the assumptions that we have about the way that society, culture, class, gender, race, etc. work in this world. (Or, the well-written, well-thought ones do, anyway.) By separating us from our preconceptions, these stories force us to rely only on the internal information provided. We become completely dependent on the author to introduce us to the rule and governing institutions, norms and unusual behaviors, even the color of the sky of the world we are entering. Cutting us off from our usual frame of reference, fantasy novels give us the freedom to get completely lost in a story.

Or maybe I just like magic.

I know that no one is going to believe any of this. That’s okay. If I thought you would, then I couldn’t’ tell you. Promise me that you won’t believe a word. That’s what Zofia used to say to me when she told me stories. - “The Faery Handbag”

Stranger Things Happen is the name of Kelly Link’s first short story collection, but it is also an apt description of her second, Magic for Beginners (which, with the title spelled out in huge type across the front, I will admit I found mildly embarrassing to read on the subway). The stories in Magic for Beginners are brilliant little slices of a life running right alongside of, but never quite touching, our own. They’re like fairy tales for grown-ups; just similar enough that I could see myself in the main character’s place, just off enough that I wasn’t sure I wanted to. They’re unsettling, and in places laugh out loud funny, and they lingered in my mind long after I put the book down. The best thing about them, though, is the way they twisted my perspective so far around as to illuminate an everyday aspect of life in a completely unexpected way.

There was something about clowns that was worse than zombies. (Or maybe something that was the same. When you see a zombie, you want to laugh at first. When you see a clown, most people get a little nervous. There’s the pallor and the cakey mortician-style makeup, the shuffling and the untidy hair. But clowns were probably malicious, and they moved fast on those little bicycles and in those little, crammed cars. Zombies weren’t much of anything. They didn’t carry musical instruments and they didn’t care whether or not you laughed at them. You always knew what zombies wanted.) Given a choice, Soap would take zombies over clowns any day. - “Some Zombie Contingency Plans”

I was, for many years, pretty active in one of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer online communities. “The Library,” the longest story in Link’s collection, sent me right back to the feeling of those Tuesday nights in the late 90s and early 00s: of anticipation and hope and excitement and the unspoken fear that maybe this one wouldn’t be able to keep all those balls—of comedy, and the horror of both high school and living on a hellmouth, and action, and romance—suspended up in the air. “The Library” encapsulates the feeling of being utterly caught up in a television show, while going the extra step further that is every fan’s secret dream, of being actually caught up in a television show.

The syllable by syllable analysis of dialogue, the cataloguing of details of costume and location and props, the hopeful identification of signs and portents; Link has perfectly nailed the joys and whimsies of fandom with a story of boy and his group of friends, and the television show that they have coalesced around. And then she steps over the edge of the expected, and brings the show to life around him, while also establishing the entire story itself as simply one more episode of the magical show. In conception, it’s a neat—and potentially confusing, or precious—series of nesting boxes. In practice, it reads as the beautiful, elegant dream that every fangirl hides away in her heart, so deeply buried that even she doesn’t know it’s there until the words begin to unspool on the page before her. With Magic for Beginners, Link has shaped stories which unfold with wonder and concise wit, that while constantly surprising me, also felt familiar, as if she had seen into my dreams, and translated them onto paper, making them funnier, more precisely angled, and more interesting in the process.

She has also crafted perhaps the best three sentences about the potential evil of couches ever written. Well, okay. Maybe the only.