Fragile Things and Smoke and Mirrors are short story and poetry collections by Neil Gaiman. I am very fond of short stories; they are a style I think unfortunately neglected today - partly due to the lack of large, respectable periodicals that publish fiction (like the magazines that published the Sherlock Holmes stories, or Vanity Fair chapter by chapter). I'm fairly hopeful that this is going to change with the advent of the Kindle however; microstories for micropayments is I think a very valid business model. That said, the restricted nature of the short story format can be constricting, and not every author can manage it.
Gaiman can, of course (it's Neil Gaiman - what did you expect?), but good as these stories are, they're not his best work; I feel that he does best on a large canvas, and with more space to develop his mythology. That said, I do wonder how these short stories compare in length of text with his graphic novels; those pretty pictures take up a lot of space, but then again a picture is worth a thousand words (and they usually don't take up that much space), so I guess my point still stands. I also enjoyed the first anthology (Fragile Things) rather more than the second, but I don't know whether that's because Smoke and Mirrors is a worse book, because I'd hit Gaiman overload or because a combination of a hangover and sunburn had ruined my mood. A few particular favourites; "A Study In Emerald" (Holmes meets Cthulhu), "October in the Chair", "Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire", "Closing Time", "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar", "Fifteen Painted Cards from a Vampire Tarot" . All but the last two are from the Fragile Things. There is a tremendous range and variety of subject matter here; I was very much reminded of the failing artist in the Sandman who, having kidnapped and raped a muse, is cursed by Dream with continuous inspiration, and is left unable to do anything but spout off ideas for stories, novels and movies (and, if I recall correctly, ends up in a straight jacket).
Winterfair Gifts is a fairly recent entry in Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan saga - a fairly lighthearted but always entertaining sci-fi series. It is also a perfect example of how the Kindle will change the way in which we consume literature; it's a novella - far too short to be economically sold in print (especially given that, good as the Vorkosigan saga is, the books aren't major blockbusters; I'd guess the ratio of price to book length for something like Harry Potter could be somewhat higher), but of course that's not a problem if you have a Kindle, so I pay a couple of quid, and get an hour or so's entertainment from the story. Long term, hopefully this type of model will lead to more diversity in the length of fiction on offer (in both directions, actually - I know there have been problems with the Song of Ice and Fire because George RR Martin keeps handing over manuscripts too long to be bound; again, not a problem with the Kindle). And now that's been said, I'm off to spend some quality time with my
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