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Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

By Neil Gaiman

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Ratings:

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5 (201 ratings)

Length: 459 pages7 hours

Publisher:: HarperCollins
Released:: Oct 13, 2009
ISBN:: 9780061804168
Format:: Book

Description

A mysterious circus terrifies an audience for one extraordinary performance before disappearing into the night. …

In a Hugo Award–winning story, a great detective must solve a most unsettling royal murder in a strangely altered Victorian England. …

Two teenage boys crash a party and meet the girls of their dreams—and nightmares. …

These marvelous creations and more showcase the unparalleled invention and storytelling brilliance—as well as the terrifyingly dark and entertaining sense of humor—of the incomparable Neil Gaiman. By turns delightful, disturbing, and diverting, Fragile Things is a gift of literary enchantment from one of the most original writers of our time.

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Book Actions

Start Reading

Book Information

Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

By Neil Gaiman

Ratings:

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5 (201 ratings)

Length: 459 pages7 hours

Description

A mysterious circus terrifies an audience for one extraordinary performance before disappearing into the night. …

In a Hugo Award–winning story, a great detective must solve a most unsettling royal murder in a strangely altered Victorian England. …

Two teenage boys crash a party and meet the girls of their dreams—and nightmares. …

All categories

Publisher:: HarperCollins
Released:: Oct 13, 2009
ISBN:: 9780061804168
Format:: Book

About the author

Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman has written highly acclaimed books for both children and adults and is the first author to have won both the Carnegie and Newbery Medals for the same work – The Graveyard Book. The L.A. Times has described his multi-million-selling graphic novel series Sandman as 'the greatest epic in the history of comic books'. Many of his books, including Coraline and Stardust, have been made into films; Neverwhere has been adapted for TV and radio; American Gods and Good Omens have been adapted into major TV series. He has also written two amazing episodes of Doctor Who and appeared in The Simpsons as himself. In 2013 he published his first adult novel for seven years, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which received stellar reviews and was a bestseller around the world. gaimanbooks.co.uk / @neilhimself For more on Neil Gaiman and his award-winning children's books, visit www.gaimanbooks.com

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Fragile Things - Neil Gaiman

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INTRODUCTION

I think…that I would rather recollect a life misspent on fragile things than spent avoiding moral debt. The words turned up in a dream and I wrote them down upon waking, uncertain what they meant or to whom they applied.

My original plan for this book of tales and imaginings, some eight years ago, was to create a short story collection that I would call These People Ought to Know Who We Are and Tell That We Were Here, after a word balloon in a panel from a Little Nemo Sunday page (you can now find a beautiful color reproduction of the page in Art Spiegelman’s book In the Shadow of No Towers), and every story would be told by one of a variety of dodgy and unreliable narrators as each explained their life, told us who they were and that, once, they too were here. A dozen people, a dozen stories. That was the idea; and then real life came along and spoiled it, as I began to write the short stories you’ll find in here, and they took on the form they needed to be told in, and while some were told in the first person and were slices of lives, others simply weren’t. One story refused to take shape until I gave it to the months of the year to tell, while another did small, efficient things with identity that meant it had to be told in the third person.

Eventually I began to gather together the material of this book, puzzling over what I should call it now that the previous title seemed no longer to apply. It was then that the One Ring Zero CD As Smart as We Are arrived, and I heard them sing the lines I had brought back from a dream, and I wondered just what I had meant by fragile things.

It seemed like a fine title for a book of short stories. There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts.

A STUDY IN EMERALD

This was written for the anthology my friend Michael Reaves edited with John Pelan, Shadows Over Baker Street. The brief from Michael was I want a story in which Sherlock Holmes meets the world of H. P. Lovecraft. I agreed to write a story but suspected there was something deeply unpromising about the setup: the world of Sherlock Holmes is so utterly rational, after all, celebrating solutions, while Lovecraft’s fictional creations were deeply, utterly irrational, and mysteries were vital to keep humanity sane. If I was going to tell a story that combined both elements there had to be an interesting way to do it that played fair with both Lovecraft and with the creations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

As a boy I had loved Philip José Farmer’s Wold Newton stories, in which dozens of characters from fiction were incorporated into one coherent world, and I had greatly enjoyed watching my friends Kim Newman and Alan Moore build their own Wold Newton–descended worlds in the Anno Dracula sequence and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, respectively. It looked like fun. I wondered if I could try something like that.

The ingredients of the story I had in the back of my head combined in ways that were better than I had hoped when I began. (Writing’s a lot like cooking. Sometimes the cake won’t rise, no matter what you do, and every now and again the cake tastes better than you ever could have dreamed it would.)

A Study in Emerald won the Hugo Award in August 2004 as Best Short Story, something that still makes me intensely proud. It also played its part in my finding myself, the following year, mysteriously inducted into the Baker Street Irregulars.

THE FAIRY REEL

Not much of a poem, really, but enormous fun to read aloud.

OCTOBER IN THE CHAIR

Written for Peter Straub, for the remarkable volume of Conjunctions that he guest-edited. It began some years earlier, at a convention in Madison, Wisconsin, at which Harlan Ellison had asked me to collaborate with him on a short story. We were placed inside a rope barrier, Harlan at his typewriter, me at my laptop. But before we could start the short story, Harlan had an introduction to finish, so while he finished his introduction I started this story and showed it to him. Nope. It reads like a Neil Gaiman story, he said. (So I put it aside and started another story, which Harlan and I have now been collaborating on ever since. Bizarrely, whenever we get together and work on it, it gets shorter.) So I had part of a story sitting on my hard drive. Peter invited me into Conjunctions a couple of years later. I wanted to write a story about a dead boy and a living one, as a sort of dry run for a book for children I had decided to write (it’s called The Graveyard Book, and I am writing it right now). It took me a little while to figure out how the story worked, and when it was done, I dedicated it to Ray Bradbury, who would have written it much better than I did.

It won the 2003 Locus Award for Best Short Story.

THE HIDDEN CHAMBER

Began with a request from two editors, the Nancys Kilpatrick and Holder, to write something gothic for their anthology, Outsiders. It seems to me that the story of Bluebeard and its variants is the most gothic of all stories, so I wrote a Bluebeard poem set in the almost empty house I was staying in at the time. Upsettling is what Humpty Dumpty called a portmanteau word, occupying the territory between upsetting and unsettling.

FORBIDDEN BRIDES OF THE FACELESS SLAVES IN THE SECRET HOUSE OF THE NIGHT OF DREAD DESIRE

I started writing this story in pencil one windy winter’s night in the waiting room between platforms five and six of East Croydon railway station. I was twenty-two, going on twenty-three. When it was done I typed it up and showed it to a couple of editors I knew. One sniffed, told me it wasn’t his kind of thing and he didn’t honestly think it was actually anybody’s kind of thing, while the other read it, looked sympathetic, and gave it back explaining that the reason it would never be printed was that it was facetious nonsense. I put it away, glad to have been saved the public embarrassment of having more people read it and dislike it.

The story stayed unread, wandering from folder to box to tub, from office to basement to attic, for another twenty years, and when I thought of it, it was only with relief that it had not been printed. One day I was asked for a story for an anthology called Gothic! and I remembered the manuscript in the attic and went up to find it, to see if there was anything in it that I could rescue.

I started reading Forbidden Brides, and as I read it I smiled. Actually, I decided, it was pretty funny, and it was smart, too; a good little story—the clumsinesses were mostly the sort of things you’d find in journeyman work, and all of them seemed easily fixable. I got out the computer and did another draft of the story, twenty years after the first, shortened the title to its present form, and sent it off to the editor. At least one reviewer felt it was facetious nonsense, but that seemed to be a minority opinion, as Forbidden Brides was picked up by several best-of-the-year anthologies and was voted Best Short Story in the 2005 Locus Awards.

I’m not sure what we can learn from that. Sometimes you just show stories to the wrong people, and nobody’s going to like everything. From time to time I wonder what else there is in the boxes in the attic.

GOOD BOYS DESERVE FAVORS, THE FLINTS OF MEMORY LANE

One story was inspired by a Lisa Snellings-Clark statue of a man holding a double bass, just as I did when I was a child; the other was written for an anthology of real-life ghost stories. Most of the other authors managed tales that were rather more satisfying than mine, although mine had the unsatisfying advantage of being perfectly true. These stories were first collected in Adventures in the Dream Trade, a miscellany published by NESFA Press in 2002, which collected lots of introductions and oddments and such.

CLOSING TIME

Michael Chabon was editing a book of genre stories to demonstrate how much fun stories are and to raise funds for 826 Valencia, which helps children to write. (The book was published as McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales.) He asked me for a story, and I asked if there was any particular genre he was missing. There was—he wanted an M. R. James–style ghost story.

So I set out to write a proper ghost story, but the finished tale owes much more to my love of the strange stories of Robert Aickman than it does to James (however, it also, once it was done, turned out to be a club story, thus managing two genres for the price of one). The story was picked up by some best-of-the-year anthologies, and took the Locus Award for Best Short Story in 2004.

All the places in this story are true places, although I have changed a few names—the Diogenes Club was really the Troy Club in Hanway Street, for example. Some of the people and events are true as well, truer than one might imagine. As I write this I find myself wondering whether that little playhouse still exists, or if they knocked it down and built houses on the ground where it waited, but I confess I have no desire actually to go and find out.

GOING WODWO

A wodwo, or wodwose, was a wild man of the woods. This was written for Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow’s anthology The Green Man.

BITTER GROUNDS

I wrote four short stories in 2002, and this was, I suspect, the best of the lot, although it won no awards. It was written for my friend Nalo Hopkinson’s anthology Mojo: Conjure Stories.

OTHER PEOPLE

I don’t remember where I was or when on the day I came up with this little Mobius story. I remember jotting down the idea and the first line, and then wondering if it was original—was I half remembering a story I’d read as a boy, something by Fredric Brown or Henry Kuttner? It felt like someone else’s story, too elegant and edgy and complete an idea, and I was suspicious of it.

A year or so later, bored on a plane, I ran across my note about the story and, having finished the magazine I was reading, I simply wrote it—it was finished before the plane landed. Then I called a handful of knowledgeable friends and read it to them, asking if it seemed familiar, if anyone had read it before. They said no. Normally I write short stories because someone has asked me to write a short story, but for once in my life I had a short story nobody was waiting for. I sent it to Gordon Van Gelder at the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and he accepted and retitled it, which was fine by me. (I’d called it Afterlife.)

I do a lot of writing on planes. When I began writing American Gods I wrote a story on a plane to New York that would, I was certain, wind up somewhere in the fabric of the book, but I could never find anywhere in the book it wanted to go. Eventually, when the book was finished and the story wasn’t in it, I made it into a Christmas card and sent it out and forgot about it. A couple of years later Hill House Press, who publish extremely nice limited editions of my books, sent it out to subscribers as a Christmas card of their own.

It never had a title. Let’s call it,

THE MAPMAKER

One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless.

The tale is the map which is the territory.

You must remember this.

There was an emperor of China almost two thousand years ago who became obsessed by the notion of mapping the land that he ruled. He had China recreated in miniature on an island which he had constructed at great expense and, incidentally, a certain amount of loss of life (for the waters were deep and cold) in a lake in the imperial estates. On this island each mountain was become a molehill, and each river the smallest rivulet. It took fully half an hour for the emperor to walk around the perimeter of his island.

Every morning, in the pale light before dawn, a hundred men would wade and swim out to the island and would carefully repair and reconstruct any feature of the landscape which had been damaged by the weather or by wild birds, or taken by the lake; and they would remove and remodel any of the imperial lands that had been damaged in actuality by floods or earthquakes or landslides, to better reflect the world as it was.

The emperor was contented by this, for the better part of a year, and then he noticed within himself a growing dissatisfaction with his island, and he began, in the time before he slept, to plan another map, fully one one-hundredth the size of his dominions. Every hut and house and hall, every tree and hill and beast would be reproduced at one one-hundredth of its height.

It was a grand plan, which would have taxed the imperial treasury to its limits to accomplish. It would have needed more men than the mind can encompass, men to map and men to measure, surveyors, census-takers, painters; it would have taken model-makers, potters, builders, and craftsmen. Six hundred professional dreamers would have been needed to reveal the nature of things hidden beneath the roots of trees, and in the deepest mountain caverns, and in the depths of the sea, for the map, to be worth anything, needed to contain both the visible empire and the invisible.

This was the emperor’s plan.

His minister of the right hand remonstrated with him one night, as they walked in the palace gardens, under a huge, golden moon.

You must know, Imperial Majesty, said the minister of the right hand, that what you intend is….

And then, courage failing him, he paused. A pale carp broke the surface of the water, shattering the reflection of the golden moon into a hundred dancing fragments, each a tiny moon in its own right, and then the moons coalesced into one unbroken circle of reflected light, hanging golden in water the color of the night sky, which was so rich a purple that it could never have been mistaken for black.

Impossible? asked the emperor, mildly. It is when emperors and kings are at their mildest that they are at their most dangerous.

Nothing that the emperor wishes could ever conceivably be impossible, said the minister of the right hand. It will, however, be costly. You will drain the imperial treasury to produce this map. You will empty cities and farms to make the land to place your map upon. You will leave behind you a country that your heirs will be too poor to govern. As your advisor, I would be failing in my duties if I did not advise you of this.

Perhaps you are right, said the emperor. Perhaps. But if I were to listen to you and to forget my map world, to leave it unconsummated, it would haunt my world and my mind, and it would spoil the taste of the food on my tongue and of the wine in my mouth.

And then he paused. Far away in the gardens they could hear the sound of a nightingale. But this map land, confided the emperor, is still only the beginning. For even as it is being constructed, I shall already be pining for and planning my masterpiece.

And what would that be? asked the minister of the right hand, mildly.

A map, said the emperor, of the Imperial Dominions, in which each house shall be represented by a life-sized house, every mountain shall be depicted by a mountain, every tree by a tree of the same size and type, every river by a river, and every man by a man.

The minister of the right hand bowed low in the moonlight, and he walked back to the Imperial Palace several respectful paces behind the emperor, deep in thought.

It is recorded that the emperor died in his sleep, and that is true, as far as it goes—although it could be remarked that his death was not entirely unassisted; and his oldest son, who became emperor in his turn, had little interest in maps or mapmaking.

The island in the lake became a haven for wild birds and all kinds of waterfowl, with no man to drive them away. They pecked down the tiny mud mountains to build their nests, and the lake eroded the shore of the island, and in time it was forgotten entirely, and only the lake remained.

The map was gone, and the mapmaker, but the land lived on.

KEEPSAKES AND TREASURES

This story, subtitled A Love Story, began life as a comic, or part of it did, written for Oscar Zarate’s noir collection, It’s Dark in London, illustrated by Warren Pleece. Warren did an excellent job, but I was dissatisfied with the story, and I wondered what had made the man who called himself Smith what he was. Al Sarrantonio asked me for a story for his 999 anthology, and I decided it would be interesting to revisit Smith and Mr. Alice and their story. They also turn up in another tale in this collection.

I think there are more stories about the unpleasant Mr. Smith to be told, particularly the one in which he and Mr. Alice come to a parting of the ways.

THE FACTS IN THE CASE OF THE DEPARTURE OF MISS FINCH

This story began when I was shown a Frank Frazetta painting of a savage woman flanked by tigers and asked to write a story to accompany it. I couldn’t think of a story, so I told what happened to Miss Finch instead.

STRANGE LITTLE GIRLS

…is really a set of twelve very short stories, written to accompany Tori Amos’s CD Strange Little Girls. Inspired by Cindy Sherman and by the songs themselves, Tori created a persona for each of the songs, and I wrote a story for each persona. It’s never been collected anywhere, although it was published in the tour book, and lines from the stories were scattered throughout the CD booklet.

HARLEQUIN VALENTINE

Lisa Snellings-Clark is a sculptor and artist whose work I have loved for years. There was a book called Strange Attraction, based on a Ferris wheel Lisa had made; a number of fine writers wrote stories for the passengers in the cars. I was asked if I would write a story inspired by the ticket-seller, a grinning harlequin.

So I did.

On the whole, stories don’t write themselves, but for this one all I really remember making up was the first sentence. After that it was a lot like taking dictation as Harlequin gleefully danced and tumbled through his Valentine’s Day.

Harlequin was the trickster figure of the commedia dell’arte, an invisible prankster with his mask and magical stick, his costume covered with diamond shapes. He loved Columbine, and would pursue her through each entertainment, coming up against such stock figures as the doctor and the clown, transforming each person he encountered on the way.

LOCKS

Goldilocks and the Three Bears was a story by the poet Robert Southey. Or rather, it wasn’t—his version told of an old woman and the three bears. The form of the story and what happened was right, but people knew that the story needed to be about a little girl rather than an old woman, and when they retold it, they put her in.

Of course, fairy tales are transmissible. You can catch them, or be infected by them. They are the currency that we share with those who walked the world before ever we were here. (Telling stories to my children that I was, in my turn, told by my parents and grandparents makes me feel part of something special and odd, part of the continuous stream of life itself.) My daughter Maddy, who was two when I wrote this for her, is eleven, and we still share stories, but they are now on television or films. We read the same books and talk about them, but I no longer read them to her, and even that was a poor replacement for telling her stories out of my head.

I believe we owe it to each other to tell stories. It’s as close to a credo as I have or will, I suspect, ever get.

THE PROBLEM OF SUSAN

The doctor the hotel had called told me the reason my neck hurt so badly, that I was throwing up and in pain and confused, was flu, and he began to list painkillers and muscle relaxants he thought I might appreciate. I picked a painkiller from the list and stumbled back to my hotel room, where I passed out, unable to move or think or hold my head up straight. On the third day my own doctor from home called, alerted by my assistant, Lorraine, and talked to me. I don’t like to make diagnoses over the phone, but you have meningitis, he said, and he was right, I did.

It was some months before I could think clearly enough to write, and this was the first piece of fiction I attempted. It was like learning to walk all over again. It was written for Al Sarrantonio’s Flights, an anthology of fantasy stories.

I read the Narnia books to myself hundreds of times as a boy, and then aloud as an adult, twice, to my children. There is so much in the books that I love, but each time I found the disposal of Susan to be intensely problematic and deeply irritating. I suppose I wanted to write a story that would be equally problematic, and just as much of an irritant, if from a different direction, and to talk about the remarkable power of children’s literature.

INSTRUCTIONS

Although I put several poems into Smoke and Mirrors, my last collection, I had originally planned that this collection would be prose only. I eventually decided to put the poems in anyway, mostly because I like this one so much. If you’re one of the people who doesn’t like poems, you may console yourself with the knowledge that they are, like this introduction, free. The book would cost you the same with or without them, and nobody pays me anything extra to put them in. Sometimes it’s nice to have something short to pick up and read and put down again, just as sometimes it’s interesting knowing a little about the background of a story, and you don’t have to read it, either. (And while I’ve spent weeks cheerfully agonizing about what order to put this collection into, how best to shape and order it, you can—and should—read it in any way that strikes your fancy.)

Quite literally, a set of instructions for what to do when you find yourself in a fairy tale.

HOW DO YOU THINK IT FEELS?

I was asked for a story for an anthology themed about gargoyles, and, deadline approaching, found myself feeling rather blank.

Gargoyles, it occurred to me, were placed upon churches and cathedrals to protect them. I wondered if a gargoyle could be placed on something else to protect it. Such as, for example, a heart….

Having just reread it for the first time in eight years, I found myself mildly surprised by the sex, but that’s probably just general dissatisfaction with the story.

MY LIFE

This odd little monologue was written to accompany a photograph of a sock monkey in a book of two hundred photographs of sock monkeys called, not surprisingly, Sock Monkeys, by photographer Arne Svenson. The sock monkey in the photo I was given looked like he’d had a hard sort of life, but an interesting one.

An old friend of mine had just started writing for the Weekly World News, and I’d had much fun making up stories for her to use. I started wondering whether there was, somewhere out there, someone who had a Weekly World News sort of a life. In Sock Monkeys it was printed as prose, but I like it better with the line breaks. I have no doubt that, given enough alcohol and a willing ear, it could go on forever. (Occasionally people write to me at my Web site to find out if I would mind if they use this, or other bits of mine, as audition pieces. I don’t mind.)

FIFTEEN PAINTED CARDS FROM A VAMPIRE TAROT

There are seven stories still to go in the Major Arcana, and I’ve promised artist Rick Berry that I’ll write them one day, and then he can paint them.

FEEDERS AND EATERS

This story was a nightmare I had in my twenties.

I love dreams. I know enough about them to know that dream logic is not story logic, and that you can rarely bring a dream back as a tale: it will have transformed from gold into leaves, from silk to cobwebs, on waking.

Still, there are things you can bring back with you from dreams: atmosphere, moments, people, a theme. This is the only time I can remember bringing back a whole story, though.

I first wrote it as a comic, illustrated by the multitalented Mark Buckingham, and then later tried re-imagining it as an outline for a pornographic horror film I’d never make (a story called Eaten: Scenes from a Moving Picture). A few years ago editor Steve Jones asked me if I would like to resurrect an unjustly forgotten story of mine for his Keep Out the Night anthology, and I remembered this story and rolled up my sleeves and started to type.

Shaggy inkcaps are indeed wonderfully tasty mushrooms, but they do deliquesce into an unpleasant, black, inky substance shortly after you’ve picked them, which is why you will never see them in shops.

DISEASEMAKER’S CROUP

I was asked to write an entry in a book of imaginary diseases (The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases, edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts). It seemed to me that an imaginary disease about making imaginary diseases might be interesting. I wrote it with the aid of a long-forgotten computer program called Babble and a dusty, leather-bound book of advice to the home physician.

IN THE END

I was trying to imagine the very last book of the Bible.

And on the subject of naming animals, can I just say how happy I was to discover that the word yeti, literally translated, apparently means that thing over there. (Quick, brave Himalayan Guide—what’s that thing over there?

Yeti.

I see.)

GOLIATH

They want you to write a story, said my agent, some years ago. "It’s to go on the Web site of a film that hasn’t come out yet, called The Matrix. They’re sending you a script." I read the film script with interest, and wrote this story, which went up onto the Web a week or so before the film came out, and is still there.

PAGES FROM A JOURNAL FOUND IN A SHOEBOX LEFT IN A GREYHOUND BUS SOMEWHERE BETWEEN TULSA, OKLAHOMA, AND LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY

This was written for my friend Tori Amos’s Scarlet’s Walk tour book, several years ago, and it made me extremely happy when it was picked up for a best-of-the-year anthology. It’s a story inspired very loosely by the music of Scarlet’s Walk. I wanted to write something about identity and travel and America, like a tiny companion piece to American Gods, in which everything, including any kind of resolution, hovered just out of reach.

HOW TO TALK TO GIRLS AT PARTIES

The process of writing a story fascinates me as much as the outcome. This one, for example, began life as two different (failed) attempts to write an account of a tourist holiday on Earth, intended for Australian critic and editor Jonathan Strahan’s upcoming anthology The Starry Rift. (The story is not in there. This is the first time it’s appeared in print. I’m going to write another story for Jonathan’s book instead, I hope.) The tale I had in mind wasn’t working; I just had a couple of fragments that didn’t go anywhere. I was doomed and had started sending e-mails to Jonathan telling him that there wasn’t going to be a story, at least, not one from me. He wrote back telling me he’d just got an excellent story in from an author I admired, and she wrote it in twenty-four hours.

So, nettled, I took an empty notebook and a pen and I went down to the gazebo at the bottom of the garden and during the course of the afternoon I wrote this story. I got to read it aloud for the first time a few weeks later at a benefit at the legendary CBGBs. It was the best possible location to read a story about punk and 1977, and it made me feel very happy.

THE DAY THE SAUCERS CAME

Written in a hotel room in New York the week I read the audio book of my novel Stardust, while waiting for a car to come and take me away, for editor and poet Rain Graves, who had asked me for a couple of poems for her Web site at www.spiderwords.com. I was happy to discover that it worked when read before an audience.

SUNBIRD

My oldest daughter, Holly, told me exactly what she wanted for her eighteenth birthday. I want something nobody else could ever give me, Dad. I want you to write me a short story. And then, because she knows me well, she added, And I know you’re always late, and I don’t want to stress you out or anything, so as long as I get it by my nineteenth birthday, you’re fine.

There was a writer from Tulsa, Oklahoma (he died in 2002), who was, for a little while in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the best short story writer in the world. His name was R. A. Lafferty, and his stories were unclassifiable and odd and inimitable—you knew you were reading a Lafferty story within a sentence. When I was young I wrote to him, and he wrote back.

Sunbird was my attempt to write a Lafferty story, and it taught me a number of things, mostly how much harder they are than they look. Holly didn’t get it until her nineteen-and-a-halfth birthday, when I was in the middle of writing Anansi Boys and decided that if I didn’t finish writing something—anything—I would probably go mad. With her permission it was published in a book with an extremely long title, often abbreviated to Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things That Aren’t As Scary…, as a benefit for the literacy program 826 NYC.

Even if you have this book, you might still want to pick up a copy of the book with the extremely long title, because it has Clement Freud’s story Grimble in it.

INVENTING ALADDIN

One thing that puzzles me (and I use puzzle here in the technical sense of really, really irritates me) is reading, as from time to time I have, learned academic books on folktales and fairy stories that explain why nobody wrote them and which go on to point out that looking for authorship of folktales is in itself a fallacy; the kind of books or articles that give the impression that all stories were stumbled upon or, at best, reshaped, and I think, Yes, but they all started somewhere, in someone’s head. Because stories start in minds—they aren’t artifacts or natural phenomena.

One scholarly book I read explained that any fairy story in which a character falls asleep obviously began life as a dream that was recounted on waking by a primitive type unable to tell dreams from reality, and this was the starting point for our fairy stories—a theory which seemed filled with holes from the get-go, because stories, the kind that survive and are retold, have narrative logic, not dream logic.

Stories are made up by people who make them up. If they work, they get retold. There’s the magic of it.

Scheherazade as a narrator was a fiction, as was her sister and the murderous king they needed nightly to placate. The Arabian Nights are a fictional construct, assembled from a variety of places, and the story of Aladdin is itself a late tale, folded into the Nights by the French only a few hundred years ago. Which is another way of saying that when it began, it certainly didn’t begin as I describe. And yet. And still.

THE MONARCH OF THE GLEN

A story that began with, and exists because of, my love of the remoter parts of Scotland, where the bones of the Earth show through, and the sky is a pale white, and it’s all astoundingly beautiful, and it feels about as remote as any place can possibly be. It was good to catch up with Shadow, two years after the events in my novel American Gods.

Robert Silverberg asked me for a novella for his second Legends collection. He didn’t mind if I wrote a Neverwhere novella or an American Gods novella. The Neverwhere novella I began had some technical troubles (it was called How the Marquis Got His Coat Back and I shall finish it one day). I began writing The Monarch of the Glen in a flat in Notting Hill, where I was directing a short film called A Short Film about John Bolton, and finished it in one long mad winter’s dash in the cabin by the lake where I’m currently typing this introduction. My friend Iselin Evensen from Norway first told me tales of the huldra, and she corrected my Norwegian. Like Bay Wolf in Smoke and Mirrors, this was influenced by Beowulf, and by the time I wrote it I was certain that the script for Beowulf that I had written for and with Roger Avary would never be made. I was of course wrong, but I enjoy the gulf between Angelina Jolie’s portrayal of Grendel’s mother in the Robert Zemeckis film and the version of the character that turns up here.

I want to thank all the editors of the various volumes in which these stories and poems first appeared, and particularly to thank Jennifer Brehl and Jane Morpeth, my editors in the U.S. and U.K., for their help and assistance and, particularly, their patience, and my literary agent, the redoubtable Merrilee Heifetz, and her gang around the world.

As I write this now, it occurs to me that the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile is how tough they truly are. There were tricks we did with eggs, as children, to show how they were, in reality, tiny load-bearing marble halls;

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Reviews

Another pick-up-put-down-pick-up-again collection of short stories.....

Rating: 4

Love it, love it, love it.

Rating: 4

A bunch of short stories and poems which concludes with a novella. I don't tend to read a lot of short fiction but have been picking at this one for quite a while. For me it was quite a mixed bag so far as quality goes but you can't argue with the quantity as there are nearly 30 entries included in this collection.. There are also introductions to each piece located in a separate section at the beginning of the book. My favourites were Monarch of the Glen (the novella which features Shadow from American Gods), Sunbird (a club set on sampling all the world's gastronomic delights), Bitter Grounds (Ghost story with voodoo element), Keepsakes and Treasures (Introduces a couple of villains who also appear in the novella) and The Hidden Chamber (possibly the creepiest poem I've ever read). Most of the rest were at least enjoyable to a certain extent even if some were instantly forgettable.

Rating: 4

I really just love listening to Neil Gaiman read, whether I'm actually paying attention to the story or not. Short stories have never been my favorite medium, but there were several interesting ones in here, and combined with Neil's performance, I enjoyed this. My biggest problem in looking back at the list of stories is not really being able to say which ones were my favorites, because I'm not entirely sure which ones they were! lol! I'm pretty sure that Bitter Grounds was one with an Anthropology/Voodoo/Missing Person spin. Also there was another that had a Matrix-esque premise of the world you feel is real actually being a simulation that I liked quite a bit.

I think at some point I would like to read this physically, since I retain them better when I'm reading visually than when I'm listening, but I will always listen to Neil reading, always. :)

I'm counting this in for Award Winning Challenge as a couple of the stories in this collection are award winners or mentions.

Study in Emerald
short story : 2004 Hugo W
novelette : 2004 Locus W

The Monarch of the Glen
novelette : 2004 Locus/2

Rating: 4

Loved it!Proper review to follow.Why did I read it? Well, I had listened to two other books by Neil Gaiman: one being a collaboration with Terry Pratchett, "Good Omens"; and the other being the 10th anniversary edition of "American Gods", which I truly enjoyed. Given this was a selection of short stories, and prose, I thought it would be entertaining for my commute. And, so it was!What's it about? Bizarre tales, short stories, the odd poem, and, finally, a little epilogue to "American Gods". A rather odd collection, though nicely set out, which I imagine can be dipped in an out of at random (if you have the hard copy, and aren't listening to Neil Gaiman narrate them himself). Tales of mythical creatures, legends, and some snatched from fragments of folklore. Included are stories from Neil Gaiman's early writings revised, edited and included here; one is a birthday gift to his daughter; and each is a wonder tale.What did I like? Every, single story, and poem. Really, I did! This collection kept me engaged, wanting to listen to every word, and not miss a moment. Neil Gaiman is a writer of the odd, the unusual, the supernatural, the otherworlds and so his tales have twists not found in other stories, but once found in the myths of old.There is a sense of humour to be found in the works, as well. Sometimes authors forget to include this in darker tales, but life, or indeed fantasy, is not just one dimensional - or shouldn't be. Neil Gaiman incorporates the whole of life, death, and everything in between in these tales.Neil Gaiman is also rather good at narrating his own work. This author knows how to bring a story to life, and doesn't seem to falter in his delivery. It's kind of refreshing to hear an author read his own words, even if you will never hear him do so live.The audio version, provided by Audible, was clear, and without fault.What didn't I like? Nope. Can't think of anything.Would I recommend it? Oh yes! To anyone who has read Neil Gaiman's other works, or even those of Terry Pratchett. If you want to read something a little different, this is it. I'll definitely be listening again.

Rating: 5

Didn't like too many of these short stories or poems which surprised me since I do enjoy Neil Gaimen's books.

Rating: 3

A splendid collection from one of my authors. Will give mini-synopses/reviews of the stories.

A Study in Emerald - Wow! I don't know if I've ever read a better short story in my life. Written for an anthology of stories where the world of Sherlock Holmes meets the world of H.P. Lovecraft, Gaiman's take gives The Ancient Ones the sanity-crumbling horror I'm used to and gives Holmes the brilliant see-everything-at-once deductive skills that we expect. A best-of-both-worlds story that's scary, thrilling, and surprising.

The Fairy Reel -

October in the Chair

The Hidden Chamber

Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire

The Flints of Memory Lane

Closing Time

Going Wodwo

Bitter Grounds

Other People

Keepsakes and Treasures

Good Boys Deserve Favors

The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch

Strange Little Girls

Harlequin Valentine

Locks

The Problem of Susan

Instructions

How Do You Think It Feels?

My Life

Fifteen Painted Cards from a Vampire Tarot

Feeders and Eaters

Diseasemaker's Croup

In the End

Goliath

Pages from a Journal Found in a Shoebox Left in a Greyhound Bus Somewhere Between Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Louisville, Kentucky

How to Talk to Girls at Parties

The Day the Saucers Came

Sunbird

Inventing Aladdin

The Monarch of the Glen

Rating: 4

I tend to prefer my supernatural fiction "vintage", by which I understand that it should be written before 1950 and/or in the style of the classic ghost, gothic or horror story. Nevertheless, I do enjoy the occasional foray into the "New Weird". In December 2014 I had read with pleasure China Mieville's "Looking for Jake and Other Stories". Over Christmas this year I opted for another anthology of short fiction: Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things. I can't say I know these two authors well enough to compare them but, if forced to do so, I'd say Mieville strikes me as grittier and more politically committed, his style owing as much to noir and thriller genres as to the tradition of supernatural fiction. On the other hand, Gaiman seems more fascinated by the world of faerie, folk tale and myth; by the sometimes subtle, sometimes shocking intrusion of the weird into everyday life. Another recurrent inspiration in this collection appears to be the act of "writing" and "creating" itself. Not only is the anthology preceded by an introduction in which Gaiman explains the genesis of each of the pieces, but some of the stories themselves are either *about* writing, writers and storytellers, or else reinterpret known literary works. For instance, in the opening story - "A Study in Emerald" - the worlds of Conan Doyle and Lovecraft combine as Sherlock Holmes is placed in an alternative 19th Century ruled by "Old One" Queen Victoria. It's the sort of divertissement which shouldn't work but ultimately does. "The Problem of Susan" presents a more disturbing and abstruse reinterpretation of characters from the Chronicles of Narnia. "Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire" veers between parody and pastiche and features an author living in a typical candle-lit Gothic world of crumbling castles and stormy nights who is suffering from a particularly acute case of writer's block. A critic described this tale as "facetious nonsense" (which it probably is), but it is hilarious - after all, parody has always been an element of the Gothic tradition. A highlight of the collection is "October in the Chair", in which, at a story-telling reunion between the months of the year, October relates the tale of a bullied boy who befriends a ghost. A prototype for The Graveyard Book , it is touching and unsettling at the same time.In other tales we meet child zombies, haunted playrooms, beautiful aliens and magical instruments. There is a return of "Shadow" from "American Gods" in the novella "Monarch of the Glen", where the protagonist finds himself pitted against a Grendel-like monster of old. In this story there is also a cameo appearance by the repulsive "Mr Smith and Mr Alice", who also get their own story - "Keepsakes and Treasures" is violent, quite revolting but strangely fascinating.With such a varied anthology there will be entries which do not work for you. In my case, I didn't particularly like the poetry and there were stories which lost me because they seemed to lack an internal logic. Gaiman points out that supernatural tales are rarely "story-shaped", so others may actually relish the feeling of being "bewildered" by a seemingly illogical tale. I don't.I must make a mental note to venture into "New Weird" more often - possibly starting with some of Gaiman's and Mieville's full-length novels.

Rating: 4

fantasy fiction horror anthology favorites

Rating: 4

Fragile Things is a diverse collection of stories and poems by Neil Gaiman. Showcasing his ability to write in a wide variety of voices, genres and styles, one doesn't get bored with this collection. There were several stories and poems here that made an impression on me:A Study in Emerald is a mash-up of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. In Gaiman's hands it works extraordinarily well - he even throws in some great twists. This is a very strong story, one of my favourites.October in the Chair features the months of the year telling stories. October's story is about a little boy who is picked on by his older brothers and runs away from home, only to befriend a ghost. This is a theme that has appeared in Gaiman's other work - The Graveyard Book, and one of the Sandman stories. This is a great tale, though sad.The Hidden Chamber is a poem about a modern Bluebeard who's empty house still holds dark secrets.Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire is a very funny story about a frustrated writer. He is determined to write great, literary fiction that reflects life, but the world he lives in seems to be straight out of a supernatural Gothic horror story. His secret passion is for fantasy fiction - stories that tell of such escapist fantasies as stockbrokers, taxis and soap commercials. Closing Time is a story that gives me the chills every time I read it. I first read it several years ago and it has stuck stubbornly in my head ever since. Four little boys find an abandoned playhouse with a demonic imp knocker . . . Bitter Grounds starts off as the story of a man trying to escape his life. He assumes the life of an anthropology professor on his way to a convention in New Orleans, to present his paper on the Haitian coffee girls - who may have been Voodoo zombies. Keepsakes and Treasures is a disturbing story, to say the least, but it certainly leaves an impression. Here, Gaiman writes in the voice of a thoroughly unlikeable character - a mobster and pedophile who works for a very, very rich man known as "Mr. Alice." Mr. Alice wants the most beautiful man in the world for his lover - a mythical being called the "Treasure of the Shahinai." The Shahinai themselves are a legendary race who's only evidence for existence is a few lines in ancient writings, but what Mr. Alice wants, he gets. I wouldn't say this is one of my favourite stories, but the imagery and the mythology in it stuck in my head.The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch features a mysterious and occult circus. A group of friends go there, trying to entertain a stern and unfriendly guest, but the show becomes steadily more fantastic and bizarre. Not everyone in their group goes home after the show is done.In Harlequin's Valentine the Harlequin pines for his Columbine and nails his bleeding heart to Missy's door, but she turns the tables on him in a surprising and satisfying way.The Problem of Susan - another of Gaiman's short stories that stuck in my head very strongly for years after the first time I read it - The Problem of Susan revisits C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia from an adult perspective. For those who don't know/remember, in the final Narnia book, The Last Battle, the character Susan is excluded from the 'happily-ever-after' in Narnia that all the other young heroes get to enjoy. Gaiman has the guts to write a dark!Aslan - an amazing and powerful story. Goliath was originally written as a companion for the first Matrix movie, but regardless of whether you have seen the movie or not, this is a very good science fiction story. I thought Gaiman did an amazing job weaving in the world of the Matrix films and bringing them to life. The collection closes with a novella-length sequel to American Gods, titled The Monarch of the Glen which features Shadow traveling in Scotland where he is hired by a mysterious little man to act as a bouncer for a strange private party.

Rating: 5

Another great collection of short stories from Neil Gaiman. I was a bit underwhelmed by "The Problem with Susan," possibly just because I've heard it praised so highly, but even average Gaiman is beautifully crafted.

Rating: 4

I liked this book, though not as much as Smoke & Mirrors. It was interesting to read the history of how each story had been conceived (or at least, for what purpose it was written).The stories were all of good quality, but none really stood out.Recommended for fans of Neil Gaiman.

Rating: 4

In short, this is another great installment from Neil Gaiman. Some of the stories blew me over (A Study In Emerald) and others were forgettable. But the entire time, I was lost in the world of Neil Gaiman's imagination (which has no competition). This story collection is worth picking up just for the American Gods story featuring Shadow.

Rating: 4

These stories are wonderful flights of fancy but what gets me is how very 'complete' they are. There is a meat, a complexity, that usually only comes from a skillful telling of a true story. There's no excess backstory but the structure of the telling shows so much more than the words themselves express. Wonderful.

Rating: 5

A bit of a mixed bag; some of the stories didn’t really do it for me - mostly these are because this isn’t my usual genre and I therefore didn’t get some of the references; the stories linked to Tori Amos’ albums or tours missed the mark for me too, because hers isn’t my kind of music. But on balance, the good stories are superb. I loved The Monarch of The Glen, the American Gods novella that rounds off this collections, and while I’m not in general a huge fan of poetry, the poems in this collection are delightful.

Rating: 4

A thematic set of short stories that focuses on intimate and revealing moments.
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Rating: 5

A thematic set of short stories that focuses on intimate and revealing moments. The collection is full of so many conflicting feelings, expectations, results, disturbing details, and effluence. It's Gaiman attempting to reach for something literary-- and that is always to be commended.

3.5

Rating: 3

Definite high points and low points, but even the low points were good. Worth re-reading.

Rating: 4

A collection of short stories and poetry featuring Gaiman’s unique mixture of spooky, creepy, morbid, snarky, dark humor. Also includes lots a little tidbits of poetry interspersed between the chapters, and introductions/context in the foreword. The audiobook is read by Gaiman as well -- he’s brilliant. Some of my favorites:A Study in Emerald This is a retelling of the Sherlock Holmes story A Study in Scarlet within the Cthulhu universe, where the ruling class consists of Lovecraftian monsters. That’s right: Gaiman wrote crossover fanfiction, and it is fantastic. Sent me into mental cascade failure by the end. Love it.Harlequin ValentineI like Harlequin type characters so I enjoyed this quasi-mythical take on the character/archetype of Italian theater. The story is sad if you empathize with the male main character, but delightful and fun if you consider Harlequin the main character -- exactly the kind of dark humor you want from a Harlequin. And his seamless transition into real life was so cool.Sunbird The gastronomical adventures of the Epicurean Society, an ages-long society dedicated to eating everything you could possibly eat. They’ve run out of new things to try, when one of the older members suggests the mysterious sunbird in Egypt. As fanciful as it was, this one felt weirdly reassuring.

Rating: 5

Ahhh, Gaiman... you just can't go wrong there!

Rating: 4

Another Gaiman. I am slowly working my way through them all. I was over halfway through this book of short stories when I got the audio book and started over. There's something about the author reading his own words that makes them more meaningful. Plus, I'm a sucker for British male narrators.

Anyways, this collection is very diverse, with poems and funny ones and mystery ones and ones I'd never read before, and everything with that little (or huge) twist I've come to expect. There are some, like "The Problem of Susan" that I'm not very happy about, but I know they will stick with me as only the best sci-fi short stories can. You know that creepy way Bradbury or Twilight Zone stories come back to haunt you every time you hear about virtual reality or fly on an airplane? Only this one is about children's books. There are some, like the novella featuring Shadow, the main character from American Gods, that are just plain good stories. They hit all the right buttons and leave you with a feeling that something amazing just happened but you missed how the magic trick happened. If I ever have a long road trip, I'm putting this back in the queue for sure.

Rating: 5

I'm a little up in the air on this collection of short stories. Some I really enjoyed; some were just odd; some I did not even understand. Maybe the last was because I was listening to it on audio and not always completely focused on it. It left me wondering if I would want to read more Gaiman.

Rating: 3

I feel like Neil Gaiman is one of those authors where most people either love him or hate him... but I only like him very, very much.
Does that make any sense? Probably not.

Anyway, there are some amazing stories here. There are also some that I could do without, like the short bits written for a Tori Amos album's liner notes. I could do without Tori Amos, too, but that's just me. I just don't agree with Neil on everything. I feel like there are a lot of people out there who do, though.

I have to say, though, I got the warmest, fuzziest feeling when I read his introduction to "How to Talk to Girls at Parties" and he mentioned how much he enjoyed reading it for the first time at CBGB. I was like, "Oh, how nice! He appreciated my club, and I was there!" (He really is an excellent reader, and very personable.)

I'd already read a few of these in other collections, but they were good enough that I didn't mind re-reading them at all.

Rating: 4

Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman (short stories) - some better than others from good to very good

Ah, it seemed such a good idea when I was wandering round Penicuik Library: two books by two of my favourite authors. Only when I got home did I realise that both were Short Stories. Now I like short stories, but you can't sit and read them continuously, you need to read a novel for that. So, this took me some time to finish.

As you would expect with Neil Gaiman, each of the stories was quirky and interesting, some appealed more than others, all were worth reading. Of course, all lacked depth/substance because some of them were only a few pages long. I particularly enjoyed the return of Shadow from American Gods: it was nice to see how he progressed post novel! It was also one of the longer stories and therefore had time to develop. In fact I think the ones I enjoyed the most were the longer stories for that very reason. Having said that, I did enjoy the poems.

In general, this is one of the collections that proves Pauline's dislike of the genre. some interesting ideas, but not enough development to really capture the imagination.

Rating: 4

A very enjoyable read, except for two of the stories which I found rather distasteful. An Audible book which was read very capably by the author.

Rating: 3

Fragile Things is a collection of short works of fiction and poems by Neil Gaiman, most of which have been previously published elsewhere. This is the fourth work by Gaiman that I have read; previously, I have read Coraline, Odd and the Frost Giants, and The Graveyard Book, all of which I was enchanted with. So, I must admit that as I was reading Fragile Things, I found myself a bit disappointed because I was having the most difficult time getting into the text.

However, it wasn't really Gaiman's writing that the problem. I think the problem solely lies with the fact that I'm not a huge fan of short story collections. I do like short stories as a genre of writing, but I think when you collect them into a single text, they seem to lose some of their charm for me. Perhaps this is because I was trying to read the collection like you would a novel and simply could not get into a reading rhythm. I also found myself searching for a clear connection between one story to the next story of poem, and wasn't really finding any, which I think is part of what made getting into a reading rhythm more difficult. I found that when I picked up another book to read and would take longer breaks between the stories in Fragile Things that I actually enjoyed the book more.

Some of the short stories were just okay for me, while some of them I absolutely loved, especially "October in the Chair", a story in which the months of the year are personified, "Bitter Grounds", "Strange Little Girls", and "Pages of a Journal Found in a Shoebox...". Overall, I enjoyed the poetry more than I did the stories as a whole. "The Fairy Reel" was, I think, my favorite poem. I say "I think" because it's difficult to choose which poem I actually liked the most. What I found with all of the writing is that Gaiman is a master of word play, and that there are little bits and snippets of every story or poem that are little jewel-like treasures that keep singing through my head at the most mundane moments of my day (i.e. washing dishes or loading the washing machine.) I think I'll have to go back and reread this collection again soon.

Two of the parts of the book that I also enjoyed were the introduction to the text and the "Conversation with Neil Gaiman" that came at the end of my edition. Introductions are tricky little elements, I think. Often, I read an introduction to a text and wonder "Why did I bother?". But that wasn't the case with the introduction to Fragile Things. I found myself really interested in Gaiman's explanations of how each piece came to be or why it was written. "Strange Little Girls", for instance, was originally written to accompany Tori Amos' CD Strange Little Girls. So, this collection of 12 very short stories appeared as lines scattered throughout the CD booklet. "Harlequin Valentine" was a story inspired by the ticket-seller in a piece, a Ferris wheel, by Lisa Snellings-Clark and sculptor and artist.

The "Conversation with Neil Gaiman" included at the end of my edition was also equally interesting as Gaiman addressed questions such as which of the pieces in this collection was his favorite and further explored how some of the pieces were written in addition to answering some questions about his writing and writing process in general.

Rating: 4

Some excellent shorts. My favorites was shadows.

Rating: 5

Oshit! I didn't even know this existed 'til I was wikisurfing and came across a reference to The Monarch of the Glen! Sealed the deal rather quickly.

Rating: 4

Felt wistful and unnerved due to the storytelling and the character eating ginger on his sushi, because who does that

Rating: 4

I don't, in general, enjoy short story collections and despite Gaiman being one of my favorite authors, I picked away this one for a long time in-between other reads.I found the collection to be really uneven, and many of the stories felt like they'd been included simply as filler. Nothing was bad, but a few were pretty half-hearted. I think Gaiman is good at launching into a story and at creating mood, but his short story pacing feels weak. However, the American Gods novella at the end really highlights what he can do in a slightly longer form--and it's just great.

Rating: 4

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StarShipSofa No 521 Leah Cypess: Please think about supporting us on Patreon Main Fiction: "On the Ship" by Leah Cypess Originally published in Asimov's. Leah Cypess wrote her first short story – in which the narrator was an ice cream cone – at the...

StarShipSofa No 635 Floris M. Kleijne: Main Fiction: "Bringing Down the Mast" This story first appeared in The Worlds of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Vol. III. Floris M. Kleijne is the author of more than two dozen short stories in Daily Science Fiction,&nbsp...

Evil Eye by The Weird Circle: On this week’s episode of Strange Tales, The Weird Circle give us the Evil Eye. This story first aired sometime in 1944. Download StrangeTales462

StarShipSofa No 558 D.A. Xiaolin Spires: Main Fiction: "Suvu and Swashbuckling Love" by D.A. Xiaolin Spires This story originally appeared in Andromeda Spaceways Magazine (December 4, 2017). Annie Sheng, aka D.A. Xiaolin Spires, counts stars and sand, residing currently in ...