To celebrate the publication of her newest collection, Pretty Monsters, Kelly Link is releasing most of her previous collection, Magic for Beginners, as a free Creative Commons-licensed download. Due to contractual obligations two stories, “The Faery Handbag” and “Magic for Beginners,” are not included in this download. The rest of it, however, is available as a text file, in html, rtf, and pdf, on this page.
Link and her co-publisher Gavin Grant write that her first collection, Stranger Things Happen, “has been downloaded more than 60,000 times since it was placed online (and it is still selling a couple of thousand copies a year) so we’re pretty excited to release the second book, especially with the international cooperation of such large publishers.” They note that both US publisher Houghton Mifflin and UK publisher HarperPerennial have signed off on allowing the book to be distributed in this manner.