Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions

I started this book a few months ago while on an airplane. I was reading it on my kindle and got to about p20 and gave up. It seemed that other than the wedding gift story that opened the book, it was filled with vignettes about how this or that story came about. I came back to the book a few days ago and discovered that the introduction chapter was 33 pages! Each of the stories described in the intro are in the book. I would have preferred that the story of how each story came to be be placed directly ahead of the actual story. I read the stories that way, using the "go to page.." feature to return to the introduction before reading each of the stories. The stories are pretty good, well told. Adult themed, some vampire stuff which isn't my thing, but good tales nevertheless. The wedding gift was my favorite. If you like Neil Gaiman's writing, you'll like Smoke and Mirrors.

Neil Gaiman’s “Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illustrations” collected short stories and poems that Gaiman previously published elsewhere. Among the more stand-out works are “The Wedding Present” – which Gaiman included in the introduction – “Chivalry” – about the Holy Grail, “Troll Bridge,” “The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories,” “Queen of Knives,” “Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar,” “Only he End of the World Again,” “Bay Wold,” “We Can Get Them For You Wholesale,” “One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock,” “The Sweeper of Dreams,” “Vampire Sestina,” “Murder Mysteries,” and “Snow, Glass, Apples.” The works are all haunting and sweet; they take the reader to new places and leave them changed after the reading. Two stories reference the works of Lovecraft, one the works of Michael Moorcock, and a few have been adapted into other works. Both “Troll Bridge” and “Snow, Glass, Apples” later became graphic novels, “Murder Mysteries” became both an audio drama and a comic book, and “We Can Get Them for You Wholesale” has been adapted a few times as independent films. Gaiman fans will love this collection of his early work.

I love Neil Gaiman, and I love short stories. Perfect for me! I love all the fantasy stories.

Classically Gaiman, thoughtful, crazy, surprising. May not be appropriate for younger readers. But...The missing stars are not for the content.(Kindle version) On many stories the formatting is horrible. (I've checked on different devices including an official Kindle in portrait mode with only one column with default typeface) the effect is like what you get when you copy an e-mail to a word processing document and end up with a bunch of bizarre returns in the middle of sentences. It makes Mr. Gaiman's sometimes interesting sentence construction close to completely incomprehensible and only a little better after I figured out what was going on. Unless you're reading a free book, OCR scanned from multiple sources and never edited, I don't think there is any excuse for really bad formatting these days.

A great collection of tales, one of my favorite books by Gaiman.

Many fantastic short stories in this collection. Mature writing with a lot of humor and depth that it's hard to find with other authors.

I first met Gaiman's storytelling craft and writting style a long time ago through his Sandman comics. To that work I give five-plus stars.After that I read some of his novels. His books Neverwhere, American Gods and Good Omens were good, but to my opinion not superb. I gave them 3 stars. I thought his comics were better than his novels. And then I decided to try his short stories.Something told me that those would be better.I bought Smoke & Mirrors (along with Fragile Things), and it took around one week for delivery. I read Smoke & Mirrors in less time that it took to be delivered. It is not that I am such a fast reader or Amazon too slow delivering (at leas not always), but I just wanted to read more stories. I think that his style is suited better for short stories than for long novels. Even though Gaiman is a strange mix of Stephen King and Edgar A. Poe (within an Allan Moore), he is more a Poe. His short stories are very good. and now I'm reading Fragile Things.I still think of Gaiman as an excellent comic writter, thats the reason I only give 5 stars to his comics and stick to 4 for his short stories.My favorite stories were the last tale in the book (Snow, Glass, Apples), and also the tales: Murder Mysteries, Change, Nicholas was... (very very very short story but equally good), Babycakes and a story that is hidden in the introduction called Wedding Gift (don't miss reading the introduction!!!).I also liked his poem White Road. Pretty "upsettling", as Humpty Dumpty would have said.Enjoy

This was a really fun little collection of short stories and poetry. I'm not a huge fan of poetry, but if I'm forced to read it, then I will take Neil's poetry over any one else's. I'm not going to pick and choose which stories were good and which ones were grand, but I will say that there is a little something here for everyone. BEWARE however, for those that have read many Gaiman novels, many of these shorts include themes not included in his longer novels, namely sexual intercourse. There are a few of these that are pretty sexually explicit, which is a change from the typical Neil Gaiman stories. I can't really say anything bad about this collection, and really enjoyed it, and I look forward to reading more Neil Gaiman shorts.

I read this book some years ago. And now again. It has not lost its magic. Gaiman is a huge storyteller. This is one of five books that I would carry to an isolated mountain.

Llegó en buen tiempo y en perfecto estado, gran adición a la colección de Gaiman y más a esta línea con portadas de Robert McGinnis.

Nice short stories

Para ler em viagens e sem pressa.Gaiman é um gênio e cada texto dele te leva para um mundo diferente.Vale cada centavo

Per la verità devo ancora leggerlo, ho avuto modo solo di sfogliarlo, ma adoro Neil Gaiman e se questa raccolta è come le altre vale sicuramente la pena di leggerla. Per quanto riguarda spedizione e consegna, sempre eccellenti (arrivato anche un giorno in anticipo). Il libro in sé è arrivato in ottime condizioni.