Books from Neil Gaiman

Minky Woodcock: The Girl Who Handcuffed Houdini #1

A brand new 1920s mystery with a sinister twist.Unappreciated at her father’s detective agency, the fabulous, rabbit-loving Minky Woodcock straps on her gumshoes in order to uncover a magical mystery involving the world-famous escape artist, Harry Houdini.Created by acclaimed artist, author, director and playwright Cynthia von Buhler (Speakeasy Dollhouse, Evelyn Evelyn, Emily and the Strangers)! p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Calibri} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Calibri; min-height: 14.0px}
Neil Gaiman
Writer, Screenwriter
I was seduced by Cynthia Von Buhler's artwork. She is a wonder.
Books from Neil Gaiman

Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

Best known for his unforgettable roles in Monty Python, from the Flying Circus to The Meaning of Life, Eric Idle reflects on the meaning of his own life in this brilliantly entertaining memoir that takes us on an unforgettable journey from his childhood in an austere boarding school through his successful career in comedy, television, theatre and film. Coming of age as a writer and comedian during the Sixties and Seventies, Eric stumbled into the crossroads of the cultural revolution and found himself rubbing shoulders with the likes of George Harrison, David Bowie and Robin Williams, all of whom became lifelong friends. With anecdotes sprinkled throughout that involve other close friends and luminaries such as Mick Jagger, Steve Martin, Paul Simon and Mike Nichols - let alone the Pythons themselves - Eric captures a time of tremendous creative output with equal hilarity and heart. In Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, named after the song he wrote for Life of Brian that has since become the number-one song played at funerals in the UK, he shares the highlights of his life and career with the off-beat humour that has delighted audiences for decades.A legend in his own lunchtime, Eric is the author of many books, some not half bad, some not even a quarter bad. Now he enters his anecdotage as the last word in Python memoirs, and the last of this extraordinary group to tell his story. 2019 marks the fiftieth anniversary of The Pythons, and Eric is celebrating the occasion with this laugh-out-loud memoir, chock-full of behind-the-scenes stories from a high-flying life that features everyone from Princess Leia to the Queen.
Neil Gaiman
Writer, Screenwriter
On the last day, when the last human beings look out at the blackened cinders of their world, I can only hope that one of them will sing, ‘Some things in life are bad, they can really make you mad,’ and Always Look on the Bright Side of Life will ring out as humanity's final words. I loved this biography of a song and the man who made it, and the picture he paints of his life, his friends, his passions, five Pythons, and a Beatle.
Books from Neil Gaiman

Sunshine

“Sunshine” is what everyone calls her. She works long hours in her family’s coffeehouse, making her famous “Cinnamon Rolls as Big as Your Head,” Bitter Chocolate Death, Caramel Cataclysm, and other sugar-shock specials that keep the customers coming. She’s happy in her bakery—which her stepfather built specially for her—but sometimes she feels that she should have life outside the coffeehouse. One evening she drives out to the lake to get away from her family, to be alone. There hasn’t been any trouble at the lake for years. But there is trouble that night for Sunshine. She is abducted by a gang of vampires who shackle her to the wall of an abandoned mansion, within easy reach of a figure stirring in the moonlight. Sunshine knows that he is a vampire and that she is to be his dinner. Yet when dawn breaks he has not attempted to harm her. And now he needs her help to survive the day...
Neil Gaiman
Writer, Screenwriter
A gripping, funny, page-turning, pretty much perfect work of magical literature.
Books from Neil Gaiman

Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

Winner • National Book Critics Circle Award (Biography) Winner • Edgar Award (Critical/Biographical) Winner • Bram Stoker Award (Nonfiction) A New York Times Notable Book A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Pick of the Year Named one of the Best Books of the Year by Entertainment Weekly, NPR, TIME, Boston Globe, NYLON, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times, Kirkus Reviews, and Booklist In this “thoughtful and persuasive” biography, award-winning biographer Ruth Franklin establishes Shirley Jackson as a “serious and accomplished literary artist” (Charles McGrath, New York Times Book Review). Instantly heralded for its “masterful” and “thrilling” portrayal (Boston Globe), Shirley Jackson reveals the tumultuous life and inner darkness of the literary genius behind such classics as “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House. In this “remarkable act of reclamation” (Neil Gaiman), Ruth Franklin envisions Jackson as “belonging to the great tradition of Hawthorne, Poe and James” (New York Times Book Review) and demonstrates how her unique contribution to the canon “so uncannily channeled women’s nightmares and contradictions that it is ‘nothing less than the secret history of American women of her era’ ” (Washington Post). Franklin investigates the “interplay between the life, the work, and the times with real skill and insight, making this fine book a real contribution not only to biography, but to mid-20th-century women’s history” (Chicago Tribune). “Wisely rescu[ing] Shirley Jackson from any semblance of obscurity” (Lena Dunham), Franklin’s invigorating portrait stands as the definitive biography of a generational avatar and an American literary genius.
Neil Gaiman
Writer, Screenwriter
Not just a terrific biography, but a remarkable act of reclamation: if there was ever a great writer of the twentieth century who fell victim to ‘How to Dismiss Women’s Fiction,’ it was Shirley Jackson.
Books from Neil Gaiman

Ursula K. Le Guin: The Last Interview

“Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.” —Ursula K. Le Guin When she began writing in the 1960s, Ursula K. Le Guin was as much of a literary outsider as one can be: a woman writing in a landscape dominated by men, a science fiction and fantasy author in an era that dismissed “genre” literature as unserious, and a westerner living far from fashionable East Coast publishing circles. The interviews collected here—spanning a remarkable forty years of productivity, and covering everything from her Berkeley childhood to Le Guin envisioning the end of capitalism—highlight that unique perspective, which conjured some of the most prescient and lasting books in modern literature.
Neil Gaiman
Writer, Screenwriter
She inspired me as a boy, and as a young man, and as a grown-up writer. I learn more from her books at every stage of life than from any other writer: she bears rereading well.
Books from Neil Gaiman

Black Leopard, Red Wolf

FINALIST FOR THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD The New York Times Bestseller Named a Best Book of 2019 by The Wall Street Journal, TIME, NPR, GQ, Vogue, and The Washington Post "A fantasy world as well-realized as anything Tolkien made." --Neil Gaiman "Gripping, action-packed....The literary equivalent of a Marvel Comics universe." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times The epic novel, an African Game of Thrones, from the Man Booker Prize-winning author of A Brief History of Seven Killings In the stunning first novel in Marlon James's Dark Star trilogy, myth, fantasy, and history come together to explore what happens when a mercenary is hired to find a missing child. Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter: "He has a nose," people say. Engaged to track down a mysterious boy who disappeared three years earlier, Tracker breaks his own rule of always working alone when he finds himself part of a group that comes together to search for the boy. The band is a hodgepodge, full of unusual characters with secrets of their own, including a shape-shifting man-animal known as Leopard. As Tracker follows the boy's scent--from one ancient city to another; into dense forests and across deep rivers--he and the band are set upon by creatures intent on destroying them. As he struggles to survive, Tracker starts to wonder: Who, really, is this boy? Why has he been missing for so long? Why do so many people want to keep Tracker from finding him? And perhaps the most important questions of all: Who is telling the truth, and who is lying? Drawing from African history and mythology and his own rich imagination, Marlon James has written a novel unlike anything that's come before it: a saga of breathtaking adventure that's also an ambitious, involving read. Defying categorization and full of unforgettable characters, Black Leopard, Red Wolf is both surprising and profound as it explores the fundamentals of truth, the limits of power, and our need to understand them both.
Neil Gaiman
Writer, Screenwriter
A fantasy world as well-realized as anything Tolkien made.
Books from Neil Gaiman

The City We Became

'A glorious fantasy, set in that most imaginary of cities, New York' Neil Gaiman on THE CITY WE BECAME 'The most celebrated science fiction and fantasy writer of her generation... Jemisin seems able to do just about everything' NEW YORK TIMES 'Jemisin is now a pillar of speculative fiction, breathtakingly imaginative and narratively bold' ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY Five New Yorkers must band together to defend their city in the first book of a stunning new series by Hugo award-winning and New York Times bestselling author N. K. Jemisin. Every city has a soul. Some are as ancient as myths, and others are as new and destructive as children. New York City? She's got five. But every city also has a dark side. A roiling, ancient evil stirs beneath the earth, threatening to destroy the city and her five protectors unless they can come together and stop it once and for all. 'The most critically acclaimed author in contemporary science fiction and fantasy' GQ 'N. K. Jemisin is a powerhouse of speculative fiction' BUSTLE
Neil Gaiman
Writer, Screenwriter
It is such a good book.
Books from Neil Gaiman

Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe

This single volume brings together all of Poe's stories and poems, and illuminates the diverse and multifaceted genius of one of the greatest and most influential figures in American literary history.
Neil Gaiman
Writer, Screenwriter
And so, for my thirteenth birthday, I asked for and received a copy of the Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. I have no idea whether Poe is an author appropriate for thirteen-year-old boys. But I still remember the deliciousness of the final bodily death of M. Valdemar, as he came out of his trance;
Books from Neil Gaiman

Our Mutual Friend

It is impossible to overstate the importance of British novelist CHARLES DICKENS (1812-1870) not only to literature in the English language, but to Western civilization on the whole. He is arguably the first fiction writer to have become an international celebrity. He popularized episodic fiction and the cliffhanger, which had a profound influence on the development of film and television. He is entirely responsible for the popular image of Victorian London that still lingers today, and his characters-from Oliver Twist to Ebenezer Scrooge, from Miss Havisham to Uriah Heep-have become not merely iconic, but mythic. But it was his stirring portraits of ordinary people-not the upper classes or the aristocracy-and his fervent cries for social, moral, and legal justice for the working poor, and in particular for poor children, in the grim early decades of the Industrial Revolution that powerfully impacted social concerns well into the 20th century. Without Charles Dickens, we may never have seen the likes of Sherlock Holmes, Upton Sinclair, or even Bob Dylan. Here, in 30 beautiful volumes-complete with all the original illustrations-is every published word written by one of the most important writers ever. The essential collector's set will delight anyone who cherishes English literature...and who takes pleasure in constantly rediscovering its joys. This volume contains Part I of Our Mutual Friend, Dickens's final novel, which was originally serialized in standalone installments in 1864-65. A satire on avarice and the power of money to influence human behavior, it is Dickens's most sophisticated work, and the fullest expression of the writer's authority and persuasiveness.
Neil Gaiman
Writer, Screenwriter
I'm reading Our Mutual Friend, which I discovered I've never read. It's when you think you read all Dickens, and then you realize you missed one. So, I'm loving this as an audio book.
Books from Neil Gaiman

Something Wicked This Way Comes

One of Ray Bradbury’s best-known and most popular novels, Something Wicked This Way Comes, now featuring a new introduction and material about its longstanding influence on culture and genre.For those who still dream and remember, for those yet to experience the hypnotic power of its dark poetry, step inside. The show is about to begin. Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show has come to Green Town, Illinois, to destroy every life touched by its strange and sinister mystery. The carnival rolls in sometime after midnight, ushering in Halloween a week early. A calliope’s shrill siren song beckons to all with a seductive promise of dreams and youth regained. Two boys will discover the secret of its smoke, mazes, and mirrors; two friends who will soon know all too well the heavy cost of wishes…and the stuff of nightmares. Few novels have endured in the heart and memory as has Ray Bradbury’s unparalleled literary masterpiece Something Wicked This Way Comes. Scary and suspenseful, it is a timeless classic in the American canon.
Neil Gaiman
Writer, Screenwriter
Ray Bradbury’s “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” a book that Gaiman loved as a boy.
Books from Neil Gaiman

Logical Family

In this funny, poignant and unflinchingly honest memoir, one of the world's best-loved storytellers explains how he evolved from a conservative son of the Old South into a gay rights pioneer whose novels inspired millions to claim their own lives. It is a journey that leads him from the racism and misogyny of mid-century North Carolina to a homoerotic Navy initiation ceremony in the jungles of Vietnam to an awkward conversation about girls with President Richard Nixon in the Oval Office of the White House. After losing his virginity to another man 'on the very spot where the first shots of the Civil War were fired', Maupin packs his earthly belongings into his Opel GT (including a portrait of a Confederate ancestor) and heads west to that strangest of strange lands- San Francisco in the early 1970's.
Neil Gaiman
Writer, Screenwriter
Novelist Armistead Maupin’s new book of memoirs “A Logical Family,” which contains a “completely scandalous three-page sequence” featuring Armistead and actor Rock Hudson
Books from Neil Gaiman

London labour and the London poor



Neil Gaiman
Writer, Screenwriter
Henry Mayhew’s “London Labour and the London Poor,” a four volume study of Victorian street and working people, “like a Charles Dickens novel that goes out in all directions”
Books from Neil Gaiman

Shadowbahn

A LA TIMES' BEST BOOK OF 2017 (FICTION)"A beautiful, moving, strange examination of apocalypse and rebirth.” - Neil Gaiman"Erickson has mobilized so much of what feels pressing and urgent about the fractured state of the country in a way that feels fresh and not entirely hopeless, if only because the exercise of art in opposition to complacent thought can never be hopeless." - New York Times Book ReviewA chronicle of a weird road trip, a provocative work of alternative history, and a dazzling discography of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, encompassing artists from Louis Armstrong and Billie Holliday to Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, SHADOWBAHN is a richly allusive meditation on the meaning of American identity and of America itself."Jaw-dropping," says Jonathan Lethem (Granta).
Neil Gaiman
Writer, Screenwriter
Steve Erickson’s upcoming novel “Shadowbahn,” which Gaiman said was a “beautiful, moving, strange examination of apocalypse and rebirth”
Books from Neil Gaiman

The Shadow of the Torturer

Severian is a torturer, born to the guild and with an exceptionally promising career ahead of him . . . until he falls in love with one of his victims, a beautiful young noblewoman. Her excruciations are delayed for some months and, out of love, Severian helps her commit suicide and escape her fate. For a torturer, there is no more unforgivable act. In punishment he is exiled from the guild and his home city to the distant metropolis of Thrax with little more than Terminus Est, a fabled sword, to his name. Along the way he has to learn to survive in a wider world without the guild - a world in which he has already made both allies and enemies. And a strange gem is about to fall into his possession, which will only make his enemies pursue him with ever-more determination . . .Winner of the World Fantasy Award for best novel, 1981Winner of the BSFA Award for best novel, 1982
Neil Gaiman
Writer, Screenwriter
Gene Wolfe just turned 87 the other week. He's one of the finest writers of science fiction. This is a far future fantasy about a torturer who is also a Christ-like figure, who eventually becomes Emperor of the world. It's so far in the future that our age is the earliest distant myth of time, and we realise that these giant sunken towers that people live in are abandoned spaceships. It's set at the end of things - the sun is dying, everything is dying, and it’s glorious.
Books from Neil Gaiman

The Left Hand of Darkness

'Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new' Two people, until recently strangers, find themselves on a long, tortuous and dangerous journey across the ice. One is an outcast, forced to leave his beloved homeland; the other is fleeing from a different kind of persecution. What they have in common is curiosity, about others and themselves, and an almost unshakeable belief that the world can be a better place. As they journey for over 800 miles, across the harshest, most inhospitable landscape, they discover the true meaning of friendship, and of love.
Neil Gaiman
Writer, Screenwriter
It’s a giant thought experiment that’s also a cracking good read about gender. A representative from an Earth-like planet comes to a world in which human beings are all of the same gender, except for a few days each month when you become one gender and your partner becomes the other gender. So it allows you to have a king that is pregnant. I remember reading it aged ten or eleven and it rewired me inside of my head.
Books from Neil Gaiman

Neuromancer

Neuromancer is the multiple award-winning novel that launched the astonishing career of William Gibson. The first fully-realized glimpse of humankind's digital future, it is a shocking vision that has challenged our assumptions about our technology and ourselves, reinvented the way we speak and think, and forever altered the landscape of our imaginations. Now, for the first time, Ace Books is proud to present this groundbreaking literary achievement in a trade paperback edition.
Neil Gaiman
Writer, Screenwriter
It was Bill Gibson’s first novel. He’s become a much more accomplished novelist since - he’s done some amazing things - but Neuromancer set a kind of template. It was the first great cyberpunk novel. It was the first time I actually felt like a future was being described that I understood.