Jelly Ink Press

Reviews

Small Beer Press

stranger things happen
by Kelly Link
(1931520003) $16.00
-- Paypal | Mail order | Your local bookshop | Powells | Fictionwise | Mobipocket
-- T-shirts, etc.
-- Cover painting by Shelley Jackson. Click for larger image.
-- STH bibliography

Also by Kelly Link: Magic for Beginners | Trampoline

This first collection by award-winning author Kelly Link, takes fairy tales and cautionary tales, dictators and extraterrestrials, amnesiacs and honeymooners, revenants and readers alike, on a voyage into new, strange, and wonderful territory. The girl detective must go to the underworld to solve the case of the tap-dancing bank robbers. A librarian falls in love with a girl whose father collects artificial noses. A dead man posts letters home to his estranged wife. Two women named Louise begin a series of consecutive love affairs with a string of cellists. A newly married couple become participants in an apocalyptic beauty pageant. Sexy blond aliens invade New York City. A young girl learns how to make herself disappear.
These eleven extraordinary stories are quirky, spooky, and smart. They all have happy endings. Every story contains a secret prize. Each story was written especially for you.
Stories from Stranger Things Happen have won the Nebula, Tiptree, and World Fantasy Award. Stranger Things Happen was a Salon Book of the Year, one of the Village Voice's 25 Favorite Books of 2001, and was nominated for the Firecracker Alternative Book Award.

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Fifth Printing Note: We are sorry to say some copies of this printing have page 118 reprinted where page 188 should be. There are a couple of remedies. You can download the pdf of page 188 here or you can email us.
We are a tiny press and we apologize for our mistake. We hope the replacement page (or the book, below) will satisfy readers. However, if you'd rather, we will replace your book. Please email us if this is the case.
How to identify if your copy is a 5th printing: On the copyright page it states "First Edition 5 6 7 8 9 0"
Thank you.

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Free Download

July 1, 2005

Kelly Link's debut collection Stranger Things Happen is now available for as a free download in various completely open formats with no Digital Rights Management (DRM) strings attached. It is licensed under a Creative Commons (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5) license allowing readers to share the stories with friends and generally have at them in any noncommercial manner. The book is provided below in these formats: Text file, HTML, rtf, and lo-res PDF. We encourage any and all conversions into other formats. We'll happily host, credit, and add your conversion to the file list below. Please abide by these few rules for file-conversions:

• Send us a link to the reader for your conversion so that we can include it on the downloads page.
• No DRM. If your format of choice has a means of restricting copying, use or playback, please do not use it.
• If the book has been converted to your format of choice but the conversion doesn't suit you, go ahead and reconvert it for your own use and distribution. We will host the first and only the first version as the few formats we have provided are pretty much all we know anything about. And we don't know that much about those.
• Enjoy!

Downloads: To get your Free Download of Stranger Things Happen click on the links below:

Plain text file, 462k
HTML file, 483k
RTF file, 790k
Printable PDF file, 2.5MB
-- Click to open in browser. Right click (or Control+click) to "Save link" to save the pdf file to your computer.

Bonus conversions!

MobiPocket -- Conversion from the html version for MobiPocket reader with chapter information and a table of contents. 204k. (Thanks, Daniel Rodriguez)

EReader -- Conversion for Palm with chapter information and a table of contents. 204k. (Thanks, Jeff DeLeo)

HTML file, 483k -- Converted so that the table of contents is linked as is license info and about the author info. It is also html optimized for reading on a pocket pc. (Thanks Matt Katz!)

iSilo -- Converted for the e-book reader iSilo which is available for various mobile platforms. (Thanks: Colin Dunstan!)

Gnutella -- The PDF is now on the Gnutella and Gnutella2 peer-to-peer networks. (Thanks: Jules!)

Plucker -- Conversion of the HTML file on this site. Plucker is a reader for mobile devices running the Palm operating system. 198k. (Thanks: Mark Hainline!)

Plucker -- Second version that includes links for navigating from the table of contents to each story. 198k. (Thanks: Howard Bales!)

BitTorrent -- PDF via BitTorrent

PalmDoc -- For most ebook readers. 257k. (Thanks: Byron Collins!)

TomeRaider -- Ebook format for PDA's: 241k. (Thanks: Byron Collins!)

Audio

"Most of My Friends are Two-Thirds Water" read by Alex Wilson (and released under CC, of course).
-- MP3; 64kbps; 12.5MB)
-- Ogg Vorbis (.ogg); Q2; 14MB
-- AAC (.m4a); 64kbps; 12.8MB

"The Specialist's Hat" read by Jason Lundberg (40 minute MP3).

1. Why?

Today, July 1, 2005, we are publishing Kelly Link's new collection, Magic for Beginners. To celebrate we are releasing Kelly's first collection, Stranger Things Happen, as a free download in various completely open formats with no Digital Rights Management (DRM). (We hope to release Magic for Beginners later this year once all the individual story rights have reverted to the author.)

When we published our first two books, Stranger Things Happen and Meet Me in the Moon Room, we were incredibly lucky and received an incredible (repeated word on purpose: it really was -- and still is -- amazing) amount of support, advice, help and enthusiasm from readers, publishers, writers, and others across North America and beyond.

So this is one way to say thanks, everyone.

2. Creative What?

We're interested in spreading the word about Creative Commons. Copyright is a good thing and artists deserve to be paid whatever society is willing to pay for their work. But, do artists need to retain the rights to their work for 70 years after their death? Uh, no.

3. Can't I buy the book?

Will giving Stranger Things Happen away kill sales? We hope not. The book is available in hundreds of libraries, on print.google.com and Amazon.com's Search Inside program, in a few used bookshops and on BookCrossing. But there are 6 billion readers out there! This is just a way we can say thanks and give something back (or pass it on) to everyone who helped us.

So, yes, Stranger Things Happen is in its 4th printing and we certainly encourage readers to buy a copy -- we're a tiny indie press: sales are good!

4. Questions

Got a question? Email us and hopefully we'll post an answer. We are a tiny press, though, so please don't get jumpy if we don't answer immediately. We're busy freelancing or working on our next books.

More thanks:

• Much of the impetus, information and inspiration for using the Creative Commons license came from author, innovator, and groundbreaker Cory Doctorow. (Thanks, Cory!)

• Thanks also to our webhost Utopian.Net (run by artists for artists) for help with this project (and being great hosts!).

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Donate?

A number of readers pointed us toward Jim Kelly's great page of Free Audiobooks and suggested we add a donation button on this page.

Please note: this is not something you have to do (especially if you own the book!). The electronic editions above of Stranger Things Happen are Free -- and hopefully just the first of many Creative Commons-Licensed Free Downloads we'll release (check for updates).

You can buy the book at the following spots: Paypal | Mail order | Your local bookshop | Powells | Direct: 800-729-6423. If you donate below, we'll send you a thank you email but nothing else (well, unless you go wild!). We're an indie press, hoping to survive, bent on publishing the best books we can find and in no way a 501(c)3 or whatever non profit. We are 'for profit' even if that's more of a conceptual aim than an actuality as yet.

So thanks for reading. It's a noisy world and we appreciate the time you took getting here. Enjoy the book, spread it far and wide, come back sometime, and if you really want to, go ahead and donate.

 

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