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Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions by Neil Gaiman
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(Mass Market Paperback - Reprint)
- Pub. Date: August 2005
- 384pp
- Sales Rank: 52,378
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Product Details
- Pub. Date: August 2005
- Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
- Format: Mass Market Paperback, 384pp
- Sales Rank: 52,378
- ISBN-13: 9780380789023
- ISBN: 0380789027
- Edition Description: Reprint
Synopsis
Hot on the heels of his bestselling contemporary fantasy novel Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman returns with Smoke and Mirrors, a wildly entertaining and mesmerizing short story treasure box of a collection. Each new tale offers another glimpse into the tantalizing wit and charm of Neil Gaiman's imagination and unique storytelling ability. His fiction has garnered praise from writers as diverse as Norman Mailer and Stephen King, as well as singer-songwriter Tori Amos and the rock band Metallica. If you've yet to experience Gaiman's artistry, give yourself an unforgettable treat and check him out.
Dallas Morning News
Highly imaginative . . . readers will find echoes of H.P. Lovecraft, Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury and Stephen King, but the voice is all Gaiman.
More Reviews and RecommendationsBiography
Novelist Neil Gaiman has sent a British businessman tumbling into a fantastic underworld and had a devil and angel comically conspiring to thwart the Apocalypse. He found his biggest success, though, in Death, Dreams and Destruction -- and the four other similarly named siblings who controlled the reins of the human race's emotional impulses in his graphic-novel series The Sandman, a wholesale rejuvenation of graphic fiction that had everyone from Tori Amos to Norman Mailer spinning with, yes, Delirium.
More About the AuthorCustomer Reviews
- Reader Rating:
- Ratings: 19Reviews: 3
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Gaiman is coolby Anonymous
Reader Rating:
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April 13, 2009: I liked this book because it was sort of like exploring the mind of Neil Gaiman. I only recommend it to true lovers of his work. Don't read it just because you thought Stardust or Corraline were "cute".
Get it, get it, get it!by Anonymous
Reader Rating:
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February 13, 2007: If you've never read Neil Gaiman's short fiction, this is the PERFECT book to start with. It is filled with stories that will stick with you long after the last page has been turned. After you read SMOKE AND MIRRORS, read FRAGILE THINGS. Or read FRAGILE THINGS first. Whatever order you choose, you can't go wrong. 5 stars for the master...
Fact File
Name:
Neil Gaiman
Current Home:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Date of Birth:
November 10, 1960
Place of Birth:
Portchester, England
Education:
Attended Ardingly College Junior School, 1970-74, and Whitgift School, 1974-77
Awards:
Eagle Award for Violent Cases, 1988; Eagle Award for best writer of U.S. comics, 1990; World Fantasy Award for "A Midsummer Night's Dream," 1991; Bram Stoker Award for American Gods, Horror Writers Association, 2001
Biography
Neil Gaiman thought he wrote comic books. But a newspaper editor, of course, set him straight.
Back when he was riding the diabolical headwinds of his popular series of graphic novels, The Sandman, the author attended a party where he introduced himself as a comic-book writer to a newspaper's literary editor. But when the editor quickly realized who this actually was -- and the glaze melted from his eyes -- he offered Gaiman a correction tinged with astonishment: "My God, man, you don't write comics, you write graphic novels." Relating the story to theLos Angeles Times in 1995, Gaiman said, "I suddenly felt like someone who had been informed that she wasn't a hooker, that in fact she was a lady of the evening."
Gaiman's done much more, of course, than simply write graphic novels, having coauthored, with Terry Pratchett, Good Omens, a comic novel about the Apocalypse; adapted into hardcover the BBC miniseries Neverwhere about the dark underworld beneath the streets of London; and, inspired by his young daughter, put a horrifying spin on C.S. Lewis' wardrobe doors for Coraline, a children's book about a passageway into a magical, yet malevolent, land.
But it is The Sandman that is Gaiman's magnum opus.
Though he had told a career counselor in high school that he wanted to pen comic books, he had a career as a freelance journalist before his first graphic novel, Violent Cases, was published in England in 1987. DC Comics discovered him and The Sandman was born. Or reborn, actually. The comic debuted back in 1939 with a regular-Joe crime fighter in the lead. But in Gaiman's hands the tale had a more otherworldly spin, slowing introducing readers to the seven siblings Endless: Dream, Death, Desire, Destiny, Destruction, Despair and Delirium (once Delight). They all have their roles in shaping the fates of man. In fact, when Death was imprisoned for decades, the results were devastating. Richard Nixon reached The White House and Michael Jackson the Billboard charts.
Direction from newspaper editors notwithstanding, to Gaiman, these stories are still comic books. The man who shuttled back and forth between comics and classics in his formative years and can pepper his writing with references to Norse mythology as well as the vaudevillian rock group Queen, never cottoned to such highbrow/lowbrow distinctions. Comparing notes on a yachting excursion with members of the Irish rock band U2, the writer who looks like a rock star and Delirium and the rock stars who gave themselves comic-worthy names such as Bono and The Edge came to a realization: Whether the medium is pop music or comic books, not being taken seriously can be a plus. "It's safer to be in the gutter," he told The Washington Post in 1995.
In 1995, Gaiman brought The Sandman to a close and began spending more time on his nongraphic fiction, including a couple of short-story collections. A few years later he released Stardust, an adult fairy tale that has young Tristan Thorn searching for a fallen star to woo the lovely but cold Victoria Forester. In 2001, he placed an ex-con named Shadow in the middle of a war between the ancient and modern dieties in American Gods. Coming in October 2002 is another departure: an audio recording of Two Plays for Voices, which stars Bebe Neuwirth as a wise queen doing battle with a bloodthirsty child and Brian Dennehy as the Angel of Vengeance investigating the first crime in history in heaven's City of Angels.
Gaiman need not worry about defining his artistic relevance, since so many other seem to do it for him. Stephen King, Roger Zelazny and Harlan Ellison are among those who have contributed introductions to his works. William Gibson, the man who coined the term "cyberspace," called him a "a writer of rare perception and endless imagination" as well as "an American treasure." (Even though he's, technically, a British treasure transplanted to the American Midwest.) Even Norman Mailer has weighed in: "Along with all else, Sandman is a comic strip for intellectuals, and I say it's about time."
The gushiest praise, however, may come from Frank McConnell, who barely contained himself in the pages of the political and artistic journal Commonweal. Saying Gaiman "may just be the most gifted and important storyteller in English," McConnell crowned Sandman as the most important act of fiction of the day. "And that, not just because of the brilliance and intricacy of its storytelling -- and I know few stories, outside the best of Joyce, Faulkner, and Pynchon, that are more intricate," he wrote in October 1995, " but also because it tells its wonderful and humanizing tale in a medium, comic books, still largely considered demimonde by the tenured zombies of the academic establishment."
"If Sandman is a 'comic,'" he concluded, "then The Magic Flute is a 'musical' and A Midsummer Night's Dream is a skit. Read the damn thing: it's important."
Good to Know
Some fascinating factoids from our interview with Gaiman:
"One of the most enjoyable bits of writing Sandman was getting authors whose work I love to write the introductions for the collected graphic novels -- people like Steve Erickson, Gene Wolfe, Harlan Ellison, Clive Barker, Peter Straub, Mikal Gilmore, and Samuel R. Delany."
"I have a big old Addams Family house, with -- in the summertime -- a vegetable garden, and I love growing exotic pumpkins. As a boy in England I used to dream about Ray Bradbury Hallowe'ens, and am thrilled that I get them these days. Unless I'm on the road signing people's books, of course."
"According to my daughters, my most irritating habit is asking for cups of tea."
"I love radio -- and love the availability of things like the Jack Benny radio shows in MP3 format. I'm addicted to BBC radio 7, and keep buying boxed CD sets of old UK radio programs, things like Round the Horne and Hancock's Half Hour. Every now and again I'll write a radio play."
"I love thunderstorms, old houses, and dreams."
Feature Interview
In the fall of 2005, Neil Gaiman took some time out to tell us about some of his favorite books, authors, and interests. What was the book that most influenced your life or your career as a writer?
Probably Harlan Ellison's Shatterday (1980). It's a collection of Ellison's short stories, as powerful as any good Ellison collection, and I read it on a plane trip on very bad day in 1982, and Harlan's commentary in one of his introductions to stories -- on doing things, on being a writer and not just thinking you were a writer, on using the time you have -- did more to turn the almost-22-year-old me into the writer I would one day become than anything else. I got off the plane determined to be a writer.
What are your ten favorite books, and what makes them special to you?
What are some of your favorite films, and what makes them unforgettable to you?
What types of music do you like? Is there any particular kind you like to listen to when you're writing?
I like things with good lyrics -- Stephin Merritt, Thea Gilmore, Elvis Costello, Lou Reed -- and I like things with no lyrics at all, like Michael Nyman. Anything that keeps me sitting and working makes me happy. I have a full 60-gig iPod and I like to put it onto "random" mode and see what it thinks I need. Right now it's playing "Four Left Feet" by the Ditty Bops.
And Stephen Sondheim is still one of my heroes.
If you had a book club, what would it be reading?
I'd love to drag out a bunch of unfashionable and forgotten authors and see what people made of them. Thorne Smith, for example, who wrote delirious jazz age comedies and was one of the authors who made me want to write Anansi Boys, is almost entirely forgotten these days -- the only books of his that are in print are the two Topper books.
Robert Aickman, who wrote the darkest, strangest, most unsettling stories of the twentieth century, is nearly unknown. I'd make people read them, and James Branch Cabell, and Hope Mirrlees.... There are too many wonderful authors who have been swallowed up by time.
Do you have any special writing rituals? For example, what do you have on your desk when you're writing?
When I'm writing a novel, I write in fountain pen, in a notebook. I like to begin a writing day by filling a pen. If I'm working hard and well, I often have two different pens and two colours of ink on the go, to see at a glance how much I wrote in a day.
If I'm feeling particularly blank, I'll do a blog entry for the day over at www.neilgaiman.com, just to get my fingers working.
My best writing ritual I stole from Daniel PInkwater, in, I think, one of his Fishwhistle essays. When I'm meant to be writing, I can write, or I can not do anything at all. The joys of staring out of the window soon pall, and I start writing again.
Many writers are hardly "overnight success" stories. How long did it take for you to get where you are today? Any rejection-slip horror stories or inspirational anecdotes?
Not really. I've been writing now professionally for about 23 years. I'm enormously lucky in that I've been able to support a family by making stuff up and writing it down -- as a journalist for the first few years, then writing fiction, in comics and prose, ever since. I'm always very aware that very few writers can do it full time, that most are forced to take jobs in academia or elsewhere to pay for the privilege of writing.
If you could choose one new writer to be "discovered," who would it be?
Well, eighteen months ago, when I was writing Anansi Boys, it was my friend Susanna Clarke. I'd been waiting for a decade for her to finish Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and was so excited when my advance proof copy arrived.
However, the world has discovered Susanna.
I wish that the world would rediscover the late R. A. Lafferty -- teller of tall tales, and a unique prose stylist. He wrote in a rambling, wonderful style that looks amazingly easy until you try it.
Of new writers, I'm really impressed with an Australian writer named Margo Lanagan, who wrote a short story collection called Black Juice.
What tips or advice do you have for writers still looking to be discovered?
Write. Finish things. Write more. Send the things you write to places that might publish them. When they come back, send them to other places. Repeat. And read everything.
From Barnes & Noble
With winning characters and memorable situations, these short pieces evidence Gaiman's supple narrative touch, already seen in vivid relief in his Sandman graphic novels.
From the Publisher
In the deft hands of Neil Gaiman, magic is no mere illusion ... and anything is possible. In this, Gaiman's first book of short stories, his imagination and supreme artistry transform a mundane world into a place of terrible wonders — a place where an old woman can purchase the Holy Grail at a thrift store, where assassins advertise their services in the Yellow Pages under "Pest Control," and where a frightened young boy must barter for his life with a mean-spirited troll living beneath a bridge by the railroad tracks. Explore a new reality — obscured by smoke and darkness, yet brilliantly tangible — in this extraordinary collection of short works by a master prestidigitator. It will dazzle your senses, touch your heart, and haunt your dreams.
Dallas Morning News
Highly imaginative . . . readers will find echoes of H.P. Lovecraft, Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury and Stephen King, but the voice is all Gaiman.
Publishers Weekly
Imaginative twists on old legends and frightening glimpses into the impossible combine to form this impressive collection of 30 stories and poems by the author of Neverwhere and co-creator of The Sandman graphic novels. Each entry skirts the edges of a puncture in reality through which something dark and mysterious peeks. Then it moves on and the apparition is hidden away again, but not forgotten. The narratives follow a dream logic: The angel Raguel, the Vengeance of the Lord, can bum a cigarette off a youth in L.A. and tell him the truth behind Lucifer's fall ("Murder Mysteries"), and nonchalant assassins can be found in the Yellow Pages under pest control ("We Can Get Them for You Wholesale"). The bizarre and disturbing essence of the stories is highlighted by their background of absolute normalcy. Their prose is simple yet evocative, and Gaiman's characters are textured with well-defined personalities. Because the characters treat the unreal as ordinary, the eeriness of what unfolds has all the more impact. In "Chivalry," a woman finds the Holy Grail in a secondhand shop, and Galahad must trade something for it that will look just as good on her mantle. Demons take over London in "Cold Colors," because the devil has learned how to network and God can't get "saintware" up and running. The intriguing world behind these pages is indeed smoke and mirrors, just a step or a word or a story away from our own. (Nov.)
horroronline
Neil Gaiman (The Sandman and Neverwhere) apparently possesses a bottomless magic well of imagination and his recent collection, Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions, provides a brimming dipper from it for readers thirsty for unique fantasy. A dozen of the thirty or so stories and poems in Smoke and Mirrors -- including the memorable lead story "Chivalry," the tale of an unflappable widow who finds the Holy Grail in a secondhand shop -- first saw print in his award-winning Angels and Visitations, a small press miscellany of stories, poems, essays, articles, and reviews, originally published for the 1993 World Fantasy Convention. Some stories -- like "Snow, Glass, Apples," a retelling of "Snow White" -- are already fairly well-known through popular anthologies and reprintings in "year's best" collections. Familiarity, in Gaiman's case, breeds only further admiration, but Smoke and Mirrors contains plenty of newer stories, too -- such as the darkly erotic "Tastings" and "Bay Wolf," a combination of "Beowulf" and, er, "Baywatch." Gaiman's incantatory storytelling ignites both the bitter and the sweet and its smoke twists and seeps into dark corners, wafts into the light and amusing, even wends poignantly into the heart: nothing he writes should be missed.
Kirkus Reviews
A whopping collection of 30 stories, narrative poems, and unclassifiable briefer pieces from the peerlessly inventive British-born co-editor/creator of The Sandman graphic novel series and last year's terrific fantasy Neverwhere. Gaiman, who's also provided a disarmingly genial introduction, calls these tales "messages from Looking-Glass Land and pictures in shifting clouds." Though they're often derivative of both traditional folk materials and acknowledged favorite writers (such as John Collier, H.P. Lovecraft, and Michael Moorcock), the volume's numerous successes put an engaging spin on even more-than-twice-told tales. "Nicholas Was," for instance, offers in scarcely half a page a hair-raising revisionist look at the benevolent figure of Santa Claus. The poem "The White Road" deftly reimagines the English ballad about the innocent virgin fated to be sacrificed to her vulpine fiancé ("Mr. Fox"). "The Daughter of Owls" is a fiendishly compact revenge tale told in the manner of ("as by") 17th-century antiquarian John Aubrey. Elsewhere, Gaiman offers amusingly lurid images of "swinging" London in the '70s ("Looking for the Girl"), Hollywood's past and present "wild days" ("The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories"), and sex in the age of AIDS (the very erotic "Tastings"). And, at his best, he makes something daringly new out of the stories we think we know best: "Baywolf" memorably combines the narrative and pictorial elements of the real Beowulf and of TV's Baywatch; "Snowglass, Apples" retells the story of Snow White from the viewpoint of the exasperated "evil queen"; and two tales ("Shoggoth's Old Peculiar" and "Only the End of the World"), set respectively in the Innsmouth ofEngland and of New England, pay hilarious homage to Lovecraft's Ctulhu Mythos and the conventions of the classic horror film. Gaiman miscalculates only in leading off With "Chivalry," the unforgettable tale of a placid widow who discovers the Holy Grail in a secondhand shop. Nothing later on matches it in a volume that's otherwise an exhilarating display of the work of one of our most entertaining storytellers.
What People Are Saying
Stephen King
"He is a treasure-house of story, and we are lucky to have him in any medium. His fecundity, coupled with the overall quality of his work, is both wonderful and a little intimidating."--Stephen King
Clive Barker
"Gaiman is a star. He constructs stories like some demented cook might make a wedding cake, building layer upon layer, including all kinds of sweet and sour in the mix."--Clive Barker
Loading...Product Details
- Pub. Date: August 2005
- Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
- Format: Mass Market Paperback, 384pp
- Sales Rank: 52,378
- ISBN-13: 9780380789023
- ISBN: 0380789027
- Edition Description: Reprint
Table of Contents
| Reading the Entrails: A Rondel | ||
| An Introduction | 1 | |
| Chivalry | 33 | |
| Nicholas Was ... | 48 | |
| The Price | 49 | |
| Troll Bridge | 57 | |
| Don't Ask Jack | 69 | |
| The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories | 72 | |
| The White Road | 108 | |
| Queen of Knives | 120 | |
| Changes | 130 | |
| The Daughter of Owls | 141 | |
| Shoggoth's Old Peculiar | 144 | |
| Virus | 156 | |
| Looking for the Girl | 159 | |
| Only the End of the World Again | 171 | |
| Bay Wolf | 190 | |
| We Can Get Them for You Wholesaleä | 198 | |
| One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock | 209 | |
| Cold Colors | 224 | |
| The Sweeper of Dreams | 236 | |
| Foreign Parts | 238 | |
| Vampire Sestina | 255 | |
| Mouse | 257 | |
| The Sea Change | 267 | |
| When We Went to See the End of the World | 271 | |
| Desert Wind | 278 | |
| Tastings | 281 | |
| Babycakes | 290 | |
| Murder Mysteries | 292 | |
| Snow, Glass, Apples | 325 |
Interviews & Essays
Before the live bn chat, Neil Gaiman agreed to answer some of our questions:Q: If you could be any comic-book character, who would you be?A: Plastic Man. He always looked like he was enjoying himself.
Q: Who is your favorite comic villain?
A: I always liked Marvel's monster comics by Jack Kirby. Characters like Fin Fang Foom -- I think he was the monster from 40,000 fathoms.
Q: Do you have a major literary influence?
A: G. K. Chesterton -- a turn-of-the-century author who wrote from a very English perspective -- and the American writer James Branch Cabell. In 1921 Cabell was probably the most famous writer in America. Now he's completely forgotten. He wrote fantasies, historical fiction, and short stories.
Q: Do you have any favorite contemporary writers?
A: I enjoy Jonathan Carroll...and Gene Wolfe is probably my favorite science fiction writer.
Q: Do you have a favorite place to get away to?
A: I have a gazebo in the woods. I go there to write.
Q: What do you do for insomnia?
A: I go and write. If I don't feel like writing, I'll buy secondhand books on the Web -- really obscure books by really obscure authors. I also might telephone someone who will be awake.
Q: How involved are you in the film version of the "Sandman" comics?
A: I'm not. It's so huge, I figure it's best if I just stay out of it.
Q: Do you miss England?
A: Enormously.
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Nicholas Was...
older than sin, and his beard could grow no whiter. He wanted to die.
The dwarfish natives of the Arctic caverns did not speak his language, but conversed in their own, twittering tongue, conducted incomprehensible rituals, when they were not actually working in the factories.
Once every year they forced him, sobbing and protesting, into Endless Night. During the journey he would stand near every child in the world, leave one of the dwarves' invisible gifts by its bedside. The children slept, frozen into time.
He envied Prometheus and Loki, Sisyphus and Judas. His punishment was harsher.
Ho.
Ho.
Ho.
Smoke & Mirrors. Copyright © by Neil Gaiman. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.Read a Sample Chapter
Smoke and MirrorsShort Fictions and Illusions
Chapter One
Nicholas Was...
older than sin, and his beard could grow no whiter. He wanted to die.
The dwarfish natives of the Arctic caverns did not speak his language, but conversed in their own, twittering tongue, conducted incomprehensible rituals, when they were not actually working in the factories.
Once every year they forced him, sobbing and protesting, into Endless Night. During the journey he would stand near every child in the world, leave one of the dwarves' invisible gifts by its bedside. The children slept, frozen into time.
He envied Prometheus and Loki, Sisyphus and Judas. His punishment was harsher.
Ho.
Ho.
Ho.
Smoke and MirrorsShort Fictions and Illusions. Copyright © by Neil Gaiman. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
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