If the alienated flirtation of “How to Talk to Girls at Parties,” the campfire unease of “Closing Time,” or the autumnal ghostliness of “October in the Chair” stuck with you, you’ll love how Magic for Beginners walks the same knife-edge between the ordinary and the otherworldly. Link’s stories—like “The Faery Handbag” and “Stone Animals”—deliver that same after-midnight feeling: funny, tender, and quietly terrifying, with endings that haunt you the way Gaiman’s vignettes do.

If the body-swap dread of “Bitter Grounds,” the looping punishment of “Other People,” or the creeping unreality in “Closing Time” hooked you, Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties channels that same weird electricity. Stories like “The Husband Stitch” and “Especially Heinous” warp urban legends and TV procedurals into something intimate and uncanny—otherworldly in the way Gaiman lets the bizarre seep into bedrooms, kitchens, and late-night streets.

If you were drawn to the folkloric shimmer of “Instructions,” the child-at-the-bonfire storytelling of “October in the Chair,” or the fairy-tale shadows under “Sunbird,” Byatt’s novellas and tales rework djinn, demons, and wonders with intellectual bite. The title novella’s bargain with a djinn carries the same sense that old stories still breathe in contemporary rooms—much like Gaiman’s knack for letting myth step across the threshold.

If the sly pastiche of “A Study in Emerald” delighted you, or the way “The Problem of Susan” interrogates another author’s mythos made you grin, Calvino’s novel turns the act of reading into the plot itself. Chapters restart, genres shift beneath your feet, and the book riffs on authorship and audience—the same winking, meta pleasure Gaiman gives when he talks back to Sherlock Holmes and Narnia.

If “Other People” made you ponder justice and identity, or “Bitter Grounds” left you sifting questions about memory and self, Chiang’s collection offers that same reflective jolt. Tales like “Story of Your Life” and “Hell Is the Absence of God” build elegant thought experiments into human stories, delivering the quiet, lingering wonder and moral complexity you admired in Fragile Things.