“I feel like she put her fingers in my eyeballs and gave me powers,” Machado said. The author Carmen Maria Machado, who has a line of Link’s tattooed on her bicep (“She didn’t look back, but stepped off the edge of the known world”), said when she first encountered Link’s fiction more than a decade ago at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, it expanded her notion of what a story could be. Like Link, they draw on old storytelling forms, including fairy tales and Greek myths. In 2016, she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize a few years later, the MacArthur Foundation awarded her a “genius” grant for “pushing the boundaries of literary fiction.” This shift owes something to the influence Link, 53, has had on a generation of younger, mostly women writers, including Helen Oyeyemi and Karen Russell. That has changed as Link’s stature has grown.

When her first book was published more than 20 years ago, serious literature, for the most part, meant one-pound tomes of psychological realism. Early reviewers were impressed by her originality, but she remained largely unknown outside of M.F.A. For much of that time, she has worked in relative obscurity.

Since 2001, Link has published four books of short stories, with the fifth - a series of unsettling retellings of classic fairy tales - out this month. “The mechanics of how I can speak are really of no great interest, and I’m afraid I don’t really understand it myself, in any case,” a talking cat insists in a story from Link’s new collection, White Cat, Black Dog. Pressed to explain these phenomena, Link’s characters tend to change the subject. Her stories do not abide by the rules of conflict and resolution - they make sense in the way that dreams make sense. A girl from the Boston area discovers a lost world preserved inside her grandmother’s old handbag (which is made from the skin of a dog that lives inside it). A teenage girl from Iowa travels to New York to find an older guy she met online and ends up at a hotel hosting a pair of conventions: one for dentists and one for superheroes. In the stories of Kelly Link, strange things happen in otherwise ordinary settings. “I didn’t have the heart to …” She petted the leaves. We settled at the kitchen table beside a potted sweet-potato vine that had sprouted in the pantry. “I’m an absolute hobbit,” she said - a creature fond of a warm hearth and a quiet evening at home. When I arrived on a snowy night in January, she offered me wool slippers and tea. They have a Labradoodle named Koko and, out back, six chickens named after dragons and fonts: Toothless, Falkor, Fafnir, Midgard Serpent, Bembo, and Chancery. Grant, and their 14-year-old daughter, Ursula. Kelly Link lives in a yellow farmhouse in Northampton with her husband, the editor Gavin J. Link and one of her chickens, named Toothless, at her home in Northampton.

Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link