#Neil Gaiman Smoke and Mirrors

[kill-the-rockstar]

One of my friends bought me a book of @neil-gaiman short stories for my birthday. It was the same colour as my party dress which is always a good start, but they were worried I might already have it.

I didn't, somehow I'd managed to go 20 years without reading a Neil Gaiman book, so I was excited to give it a try.

I'm only about three stories in, but I don't know how to describe being intensely and simultaneously reminded that this is both the mind that helped create the wonder of Good Omens and the one that came up with the horror of Coraline.

10/10 so far, would recommend.

[freezingfogsblog]

Neil Gaiman writes short stories so so well but they literally fall into 3 categories:

-the occult treated so mundanely that it makes you cry and scream at the night stars and wish for a childhood so foreign that you don't recognise yourself afterwards

-a fucked up poem

-a poemed up fuck

[wheneverfeasible]

I used this link to see what my writing style was like and I—

I am humbled by this honor. It’s not the first time someone has told me my writing style was reminiscent of Mr. Gaiman’s and it remains to this day the highest and greatest compliment I have ever received.

I doubt @neil-gaiman will see this, but I really had to share.

[thelastofthebookworms]

For uniformity's sake :

Each work count as 1,

e.g. Sandman counts as one because different editions mean a different number of volumes and Danny who's read the 3 Omnibus Volumes has read just as much as Nawel who's read 14 volumes.

Yes it means that someone who's read one issue will vote for the same thing that someone who's read the whole thing. No system is perfect.

If you've read one work (let's say The Graveyard Book) and its adaptation (let's say P. Craig Russell's), it counts as two, though (and not 3 even if the graphic novel is divided in two parts)

Of course audiobooks count.

[cerysdelaney]

Bookstore Purchase with No Regrets: Three Gaiman Short Story Collections

@neil-gaiman is one of those authors that I found through an anthology, “The Faery Reel: Tales from the Twilight Realm,” in which he had written a poem of the same name that enchanted me, perhaps forever. I am grateful to this day that this anthology left a list of his works like a treasure map.

“They’d slice [my heart] into four and then

they’d string with it a violin.

And every day and every night

they’d play upon my heart a song

So plaintive and so wild and strange

that all who heard it danced along” (Faery Reel)

Fast forward 17 years later to last week when I’m perusing a bookstore’s shelves and find three of his short story collections. I purchase one, read the introduction in the cafe, and then give into temptation and purchase the other two. How could I not? Just read him:

“A few of [these stories] were written to amuse myself, or, more precisely, to get an idea or an image out of my head and pinned safely down on paper; which is as good a reason for writing as I know: releasing demons, letting them fly.” (Smoke and Mirrors - this now sits at my bedside for a nightly tale before bed)

“There are things in this book, as in life, that might upset you. There is death and pain in here, tears and discomfort, violence of all kinds, cruelty, even abuse. There is kindness, too, I hope, sometimes. Even a handful of happy endings. (Few stories end unhappily for all participants, after all). And there’s more than that: I know a lady called Rocky who is triggered by tentacles, and who genuinely needs warnings for things that have tentacles in them, especially tentacles with suckers, and who, confronted with an unexpected slice of squid or octopus, will dive, shaking, behind the nearest sofa. There is an enormous tentacle somewhere in these pages.” (Trigger Warning - this rests in my purse for random times when I’m asked to wait)

“It occurs to me that the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile is how tough they truly are…Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkably difficult to kill.” (Fragile Things - hides in the living room by the couch, just out of reach of my toddler and waits for moments of quiet to tell me a story, or at least, part of one, before the next adventure).

Thank you, Mr. Gaiman, siren, pied piper, sandman, and dreamer - perhaps captive - setting part of your soul loose to tell stories so plaintive and so wild and strange.

It’s nice to have traveling companions, for a while or for a lifetime.

[godzilla-reads]

Smoke ☁️ & Mirrors 🪞

[randumblygeneratedusername]

"Still, she was real; she had lived. She had been worshipped and adored by the people in the movie palaces. She had kissed the fish, and walked on the grounds of my hotel seventy years before: no time in England, but an eternity in Hollywood."

Neil Gaiman, The Goldfish Pool

[itisiives]

I'm reading "The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories" and

"...I wrote a six-page treatment for a film called When We Were Badd..."

And it hurts. Oh God, how it hurts.

[defxserpentine]

Happy belated and blessed birthday to the beautiful and bewitching human that is @neil-gaiman.

[wideeyedreader]

Recently Read: Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman

4.5 stars!

[macmanx]

An elderly widow purchases the Holy Grail at a second-hand store, and becomes wrapped up in an epic quest.

"Chivalry" appears in @neil-gaiman's collection Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illustrations.

[pilibdc]

JOMP BPC JULY 1: Currently Reading

Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman

[childrenofdaindustrialrevolution]

When your favorite childhood TV show was PBS’s Wishbone…Chivalry by Neil Gaiman featuring Kasha McCloud as Mrs. Whittaker.

[thelastofthebookworms]

Other polls in my pinned post.

[ineffablecpp]

It's finally here!!