LE PORTRAIT MAGAZINE MARCH-SEPTEMBER ISSUE | Page 5

phantasmagoric, Borgesian kind of way (although you can also see his
influence from time to time when reading Link); rather, Link’s work
feels fully realized, emerging from her brain as truly and impossibly
colored. She’s the sort of writer always able to surprise me, even though
I’ve finished all of her other books, even her latest collection, Get in
Trouble. Link’s writing has been compared to everything and
everybody, from H.P. Lovecraft, to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and
hardboiled noir writers, but stands out in its originality and idiosyncratic
loveliness.

The Visiting Privilege by Joy Williams
Joy Williams has long been one of America’s greatest living writers,
and The Visiting Privilege might have been the best book of the
year. Her sentences are as sharp and precise as scalpel incisions, and her
ability to turn the real beautifully surreal is second to none. Ben Marcus,
in the New York Times Book Review, called her work “one of the most
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