The Dreaming

Upon entering library school, every student gets a subscription to Unshelved.

I am kidding, but they should. Although as long as you’ve worked in any customer service capacity, the strip resonates.

Anyway, as a long time reader, I was really pleased to see this as their second Sunday full color ‘Book Club’ feature. So without further ado…

Green Man Review reviews Anansi Boys

Lisa Snellings-Clark is calling for submissions for Tiny Stories, a collection of 100-word short stories.

Goodbye, twenty minutes of work. And this wasn’t even supposed to be a real update to start with.

So quickly, Mirrormask won a Bank of Scotland Herald Angel at the Edinburgh International Film Festival; if you’re interested in the CBC Studio One Book Club event on October 6th, you may also want to check check either the Vancouver International Writers Festival or Georgia Straight websites, at least until the labor dispute is over, and finally, the journal made it into the Feedster Top 500, not that you can read it through LJ at the moment.

In no particular order…

Beowulf:

First Amendment Project:

Mirrormask:

Anansi Boys:

And Deady the Evil Teddy for good measure.

Real update soonish, hopefully. In the meanwhile, this made me chuckle.

It works! Hurrah!

Yes, you should have been asleep.

From the July 29th Rocky Mountain News:

Mirrormask
By Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean (William Morrow, $34.95).
Grade: A

For several years, author Neil Gaiman and artist Dave McKean, both World Fantasy Award winners, have been dreaming, then collaborating, on a fantasy feature film “in the tradition of The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth.” On Sept. 23, their dream becomes a reality when the Jim Henson Co. and Sony Pictures release Mirrormask.

Gaiman fans who have been following his career since his Sandman comic-book days will be excited by the book version of the film. The handsomely produced volume contains 50 color photographs of scenes from the film and more than 1,700 of McKean’s storyboard pictures, as well as Gaiman’s script.

The tale is a turnabout of a common childhood fantasy. What child hasn’t, at one time or another, wished to run away and join the circus? In Mirrormask, 15-year-old Helena Campbell, the daughter of the owners of a small traveling circus, wants to run away from the circus and “join real life.”

When her mother becomes ill and her father is forced to temporarily close the Campbell Family Circus, Helena gets a taste of that reality and finds it lacking. Soon she abandons it for a dream world filled with fantastic creatures, a world where light and darkness are precariously balanced, yet one that strangely parallels her own.

The Queen of Light lies in a coma. The Queen of Darkness wants to rule over all, butshe doesn’t realize that if the world tips out of balance, all will be destroyed. The only hope for Helena is to find a mysterious talisman, the Mirrormask, which will not only awaken the Queen of Light but save her real mother, as well.

This beautiful book should whet the appetites of moviegoers of any age who long for a unique fantasy experience.
–Mark Graham

Meanwhile, Mirrormask (being the movie, not the script book) has been recommended as an “essential” film at Edinburgh International Film Festival by the July 30th Daily Telegraph. It plays on August 19th and 27th; more information is available here.