A quick heads up – Neil will be interviewed as part of WNYC’s Leonard Lopate show on Thursday, September 29th at noon EST. It also looks like it will be rebroadcast on Friday, September 30th, at 3:00am EST. The show streams in Windows and MP3, and is archived. It is also broadcast direct to air in New York City on 93.9 FM and 820 AM.
From today’s Rocky Mountain News.
Neil Gaiman’s amazing and expansive American Gods is the only novel ever to win Hugo, Nebula and Bram Stoker awards. The book was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award and deserved to win that one, as well. Now Gaiman, of Sandman comic-book fame, looks at the old gods from a more humorous viewpoint in Anansi Boys. Gaiman’s own description of the novel is hard to beat: “It’s a scary, funny sort of a story, which isn’t exactly a thriller, and isn’t really horror, and doesn’t quite qualify as a ghost story (although it has at least one ghost in it) or a romantic comedy (although there are several romances in there, and it’s certainly a comedy, except for the scary bits). If you have to classify it, it’s probably a magical-horror-thriller-ghost-rom- antic-comedy-family-epic, although that leaves out the detective bits and much of the food.” Fat Charlie Nancy wasn’t fat anymore. He’d been pudgy as a boy, and his father had gifted him with the awful nickname. When Mr. Nancy gave someone a name it stuck, because, in addition to being Charlie’s dad, Mr. Nancy was a god. More specifically, he was Anansi, the trickster god who first brought stories to earth. Sometimes Anansi is a spider, sometimes a man and, sometimes, something in between. The story opens as Fat Charlie attends his father’s funeral. There, he learns that he has a brother he never knew who inherited all of his father’s magic, and if Charlie ever needs his brother, to tell a spider. Sure enough, on his return to England, Charlie’s life becomes so complicated that he tells a spider, half in jest – and when the brothers get together, the fun begins. What follows is Gaiman at his best, with the Anansi boys falling in and out of love, running from the law, visiting with all the old gods their father has tricked in the past and learning what family is all about. I hope the author’s trophy case has an empty shelf, because, at the end of the year, the awards should come rolling in again.
–Mark Graham
The Rocky Mountain News also has information on the Tattered Cover signing in Denver on September 27th.
From today’s Atlanta Journal Constitution:
Verdict: An offbeat comic fantasy that sings. If you Google the name Neil, the most popular links are not Armstrong or Young, Simon or Diamond. Most popular is Neil Gaiman, a British fantasy and sci-fi author who has a following of sufficient size that it easily surpasses cult, although it falls short of household-name-dom. With his shaggy, Byronic good looks, black leather jackets and shades, Gaiman is almost a semi-mythic figure to his fans, even if his nonstop blogging presents him as a very regular guy. So it’s appropriate that his latest novel — which may break through to some of those unaware households — is about mythic figures and regular guys, and how sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which. His last big book, the Hugo Award-winning American Gods (2001), was a fantasy epic with an intriguing idea: What if the old “small g” gods — Norse, Native American, African — lived in contemporary America, but with diminished powers, in a culture that worships the gods of DSL, SUV and TiVo above all else? Its imagination was impressive, but at times you could hear Gaiman (who’s still best known for his Sandman series of graphic novels) huffing and puffing, trying to bring forth Stephen King’s The Stand. Anansi Boys takes “a sliver of DNA,” in Gaiman’s words, from American Gods to produce a very different (and in many ways more enjoyable) novel, a welterweight boxer of a book — light on its feet, but capable of delivering a punch. “God is dead. Meet the kids” is the novel’s irreverent marketing slogan. The book is dedicated to, among others, Tex Avery, creator of the wackiest Bugs Bunny cartoons, and P.G. Wodehouse, creator of light British whimsy. Combine those two incompatible forces and you’re in the off-kilter world of Anansi Boys. In the old legends, Anansi is an African trickster god who usually takes the form of a spider. He’s cunning, lustful and life-affirming, all characteristics of the man named Spider who shows up at Charlie Nancy’s London flat claiming to be his long-lost brother. Charlie, whom everyone calls “Fat Charlie” even though he hasn’t been fat for years, is a human kick-me sign, a sad schlub with a soul-killing accounting job, a fiancee who doesn’t really love him and a future of unmitigated dimness. Spider shakes up Charlie big-time (and not out of altruism or brotherly love) by connecting him with his heritage — explaining that he is the son of the great and timeless Anansi himself, who here takes the form of a dapper elderly man with a fondness for the ladies, fedoras and karaoke. Indeed, karaoke plays a rather large role in Anansi Boys. Usually when a character is said to be fond of “wine, women and song,” it’s understood that the song is pretty much an afterthought to the first two, but not here. “Each person who ever was or will be has a song,” Gaiman writes. “It isn’t a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their own song. Most of us fear we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or honest, or too odd. So people live their songs instead.” A righteous policewoman’s song, for example, begins “Evildoers beware!” She is too embarrassed to sing it, but she lives it every day. Elsewhere in Anansi Boys, Gaiman throws in alternate dimensions, seances, murder and a chilling homage to Hitchcock’s The Birds, all of which feel more in step with what’s expected from a fantasy novel. But it’s the singing that sets this book apart. It’s somewhat out of place, and Gaiman knows it, and so do his characters, and that makes the song even sweeter.
–Phil Kloer
I’m not sure this will post correctly, as I’m not hosting these images, so keep your fingers crossed. If it doesn’t work, blame me – if it does, credit Bill^2, who was smart enough to grab a picture at absolutely the right time. Thanks Bill!
At the Union Square signing, Neil mentioned that Harper Collins would be reprinting Good Omens as in hardcover, with two new covers. While this will probably not be the final images used, we did get a sneak peak at the mock-ups. That’d be Aziraphale on the black cover and Crowley on the white one, unless I’m completely mucking things up. And yes, the subtitle is split over the two covers.
From the September 23rd Associated Press Newswire:
Cooler-than-cool author Neil Gaiman is proof that you’re never cool to your own kids. Gaiman, 45, dresses in rock-star black, from his boots and pants to his T-shirt and leather jacket. But the best-selling fantasy and graphic-novel writer says his 11-year-old daughter makes him turn off whatever music is playing in his car when he drops her off at school, so he won’t embarrass her. ” `Oh my God, Dad, my friends are coming over, you’re not allowed to speak to them,’ ” Gaiman recounts his daughter saying. “Nobody’s cool, if you’ve got kids,” adds Gaiman, who also has a 22-year-old son and a 20-year-old daughter. Gaiman explores the embarrassment parents cause their children in his new book, Anansi Boys. The protagonist, Charles Nancy, dubbed “Fat Charlie” by his joke-loving father, suffers one indignity after another, including his father dying while singing in a karaoke bar. But that’s just the start of Fat Charlie’s woes. It turns out his father was Anansi, the trickster spider-god of West African folklore, and soon a magical brother Fat Charlie never knew he had turns up to insinuate his way into his drab life. Anansi Boys hits bookstores just as MirrorMask, a movie written by Gaiman and directed by artist Dave McKean, a longtime Gaiman collaborator, is about to open in limited release Sept. 30. Taking a break while autographing stacks of his new book in the backroom of DreamHaven Books and Comics in south Minneapolis, Gaiman (pronounced GAYM’n) recalls being embarrassed by his own father as a teenager growing up in England. Gaiman says his father had gotten bright-yellow European shoes that were “not shaped like any shoes any human being has worn before or since” and looked like “two giant bananas.” “And I would try and walk far enough away that people would not assume I was with him,” Gaiman says. Gaiman, who gained fame in the 1990s with the epic Sandman comic-book series, says he wanted to return to the humor of Good Omens, his 1990 novel with Terry Pratchett about a misplaced baby Antichrist. Since Good Omens appeared 15 years ago, he said, “People by now had begun to conclude that obviously that book must have been written by me writing a very serious book and Terry dancing behind me, scattering jokes like little flowers through the text.” Anansi Boys packs plenty of absurdist humor, with Fat Charlie turning up late for his father’s funeral and delivering a heartfelt speech to the wrong casket. But there’s also magic, as Fat Charlie is transported to the ends of the world to ask the African gods to rid him of his charismatic brother, Spider, and a gruesome murder. Gaiman – a tall man with a prominent nose, brown eyes and hints of gray in his shaggy hair – is warm and approachable in person. Sipping tea, he talks of everything from his homesickness for England (he lives near Minneapolis after moving to America about 12 years ago so his family could be near his wife’s relatives) to writers’ relationships with their fans (he blogs on his Web site, http://www.neilgaiman.com) to his support for the First Amendment Project and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. It was Gaiman’s idea to have authors auction off character’s names in books to raise money for the First Amendment Project. On eBay, Gaiman is auctioning off a name on a tombstone in his next children’s novel. The highest bid as of Wednesday was $2,700. “I think the First Amendment is probably the most important thing that you have in this country. And I’m always horrified at the cavalier way that you (Americans) treat it,” Gaiman says. Gaiman resists pigeonholing of his work, pointing out that his 2001 novel American Gods won awards for best science fiction, horror and fantasy. “It’s just a matter of shelving. It doesn’t mean anything. Genre tags are just telling people in a Barnes and Noble where to go and put books,” he says. Born in Porchester, on the south coast of England, Gaiman says he spent his life wanting to be a writer. “You get to make up worlds,” he says. “It’s the nearest thing you actually get to playing God and being paid for it.” Gaiman grew up loving the works of British writers C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and G.K. Chesterton before moving on to science fiction authors Samuel R. Delany, Roger Zelazny, Harlan Ellison and R.A. Lafferty. “I was the kind of kid whose parents would drop him off at the local town library on their way to work, and I’d go and work my way through the children’s area,” Gaiman recalls. Although Jewish, Gaiman says he was accepted at a “very high and very strict” Church of England school because of his exam results and interview. He says his schooling “gave me this wonderfully alien point of view on religion.” “I was top of my class in religious studies. I just didn’t happen to believe it. I just thought these were really, really interesting stories,” he says. As a freelance book reviewer in his 20s, Gaiman says he “wound up reading all this stuff I never would have read,” which taught him the techniques of mainstream fiction. “Somebody would say, `Can you do us an article about big, bodice-ripping, blockbusting romance novels?’ And I’d say, `Yes, of course,’ because I was a hungry young journalist,” Gaiman says. In 1985, Gaiman met Dave McKean, a young art student. They collaborated on a comic called Black Orchid, then did Sandman, with McKean doing the covers and Gaiman the writing. Sandman, with a gloomy central character called Morpheus or Dream, ran 75 issues. “The best thing I think about me and Dave as a creative team is, we don’t have to work together. We both have individual careers,” says Gaiman, who also has written children’s books such as Coraline illustrated by McKean. “So whenever we come together to work together it’s because it’s fun and because we want to.” McKean says he and Gaiman trust each other. “We’ve grown up together, so there’s no b——- in our relationship. We test each other, and provoke each other into trying new things,” McKean said in an e-mail. Their latest collaboration is MirrorMask, a live-action and animated film about a 15-year-old girl who runs away from a circus and enters a dream world. Gaiman says Sony Pictures had approached the Jim Henson Co. about producing another film like The Dark Crystal or Labyrinth, which were considered flops in the 1980s but had discovered new life on video. The budget was only $4 million. Gaiman says he offered to write the screenplay at a fraction of his usual quote. “The deal was very, very simple. From Henson, it was, `We will give you not enough money to make a film with, and in return, we will leave you alone. You get creative control. Give us (a) family fantasy film,’” Gaiman says. Although MirrorMask has been screened at Sundance and other film festivals, Gaiman realizes it probably will become a cult movie – and he’s “perfectly happy” with that. “I would feel `MirrorMask’ had done what Dave and I set out to do if in, you know, 20, 30 years time, when I’m a cranky old man, some bright young thing comes up to me and goes, `Oh my God, you made `MirrorMask.’ That was the film that I watched, that was the thing that got me through my 15-year-old angst,’ ” Gaiman says.
–Jeff Baenen
From the September 23, 2005 Christian Science Monitor:
Charlie Nancy is an easily embarrassed London accountant in this sort-of sequel to Gaiman’s “American Gods,” winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards. Attending his father’s funeral, Charlie discovers two disconcerting facts:
1) His dad was actually Anansi, an African trickster god; and
2) Charlie has a brother, Spider, who’s inherited some of his dad’s powers.
When Spider comes to visit, he proceeds to seduce Charlie’s fiancée and get Charlie fired from his (admittedly horrible) job. Then things start getting out of control. The genre-busting novel is very creative and very funny, two Gaiman specialties. Its sweep is less epic than “American Gods,” but it works well on its own terms. Grade: A-
–Yvonne Zipp
David Colton reviewed Anansi Boys in the September 21st USAToday, while Michael Maiello’s review of the novel appeared in the September 21st Forbes: both reviews were positive. The SFFWorld review by Rob H Bedfold has also been posted.
From the September 18th Star Tribune:
Google “Neil” — just the first name, spelled that way — and the first hit is for the writer Neil Gaiman. It’s a testament to Gaiman’s big presence on the Internet, where he was an early adopter of the blog as a way of bypassing traditional media, and where he regularly stokes his massive cult audience with anecdotes from home and abroad, responses to fans’ questions, shout-outs to friends and musicians he admires, and, it seems, pretty much anything else that strikes his fancy. Gaiman started the blog during the long tour to promote his 2001 novel American Gods, the big work that introduced him to a wider audience beyond the one he had cultivated as the longtime writer of the influential 1990s comic book series The Sandman. Anansi Boys, Gaiman’s first adult novel since American Gods, is drawn from the earlier book. But where American Gods purposely was a “big book” — nearly epic, filled with grand themes and wide-open landscapes and bespeaking a clash of titanic, totemistic forces for the soul of America — Anansi Boys is comedic, family-centered, romantic and told on a much smaller scale. The central conceit is the same: The old gods of Norse, Irish, African and other mythologies live among us today, carried over in immigrant folklore and appearing to us as benign, if eccentric, elderly humans. Anansi — the trickster man-spider from West African legends who migrated to the Americas on the tongues of slaves — was a secondary character in “American Gods.” Here, he and his family occupy the stage’s entirety. Anansi’s human son, Charlie Nancy — nicknamed Fat Charlie — knows nothing about his father’s true god nature. He thinks his dad’s last name is Nancy and that he hasn’t been much of a father, and of course he’s partly right — in the way family members always are partly right about each other. And for that reason (and related ones) Charlie is estranged from his dad and living in London. But he is called back to his hometown in Florida on the news that his father has died. After the funeral, he is told by an old neighbor lady, a close family friend, that he has a brother he never knew. One day, quite magically, Charlie’s brother, Spider, appears, and it’s clear from the start that Spider isn’t anything like Charlie: He is confident and smooth with ladies, wears clothes Charlie could never pull off and doesn’t seem to care overmuch about anything. The heart of the novel is the story of the brothers and how (rather predictably, if you want to know the truth) they learn from each other and grow, discovering more about themselves the more they learn about the other. The structure is classic Gaiman: A likable everyman dupe (Charlie) is slowly drawn into a shadowy, fantastical otherworld he never knew existed, one that exists “a candle flame’s thickness away” from our own, and which, once entered, shows the dupe how truly wrong his own view of reality is. It was the same thing in American Gods and in an earlier novel, Neverwhere, and if I didn’t find the routine so charming, I’d probably complain. Gaiman is witty and engaging, but his power is more as a storyteller than as a stylist, and I think what his fans find so appealing about his stories is that they are comforting, no matter how scary, like a good bedtime tale. And like those kinds of stories, Gaiman’s tales have discrete beginnings and ends, with plenty of good and evil (and combinations of the two) — and, if not a happy ending, then a satisfying one that leaves a sense of a journey conducted, of lands seen and things accomplished. What’s lovely about Gaiman’s works — their essential strength, really — is his ability to lure a reader into those otherworlds — be it a fantastical underground London Neverwhere) or the mythological godlands of his recent books. “There are myth-places. They exist, each in their own way,” he writes. One senses he might actually believe it. Or, at the very least, believes that our world wouldn’t be worth much if we couldn’t, just for a while at least, believe in other ones.
–Eric Hanson
I am assuming the mention in the September 19th Grand Rapids Press was a review; unfortunately, it only appeared in the print edition.
The San Francisco Chronicle‘s Heidi Benson posted an account of the First Amendment Project auctions on September 22nd.
And this is a call out, of sorts.
If anyone has attended one of the stops on the Anansi Boys tour and would be willing to share your experiences with the rest of us, please drop me a note with a link to your weblog or journal entry.
Many thanks in advance.
There will be a longer post later, assuming between myself and Reg we can make out the chicken scrawl that is my handwriting. Hopefully a quick summary will suffice for now.
Neil read the dedication and a piece of the first chapter of Anansi Boys, psychically predicted the first three questions we would ask by explaining the status of the Good Omens, Death and Me (nee Death: The High Cost of Living), and Beowulf films, and then took questions from the audience, the most newsworthy being the announcement that the second of Neil’s two Marvel projects (1602 was the first) will be The Eternals.
Guidelines as to how the lines at the B&N Union Square signing were going to be handled were bent to the point where they ended up tattered and waving in the breeze, and the protocol of not taking pictures with the author in order to expedite the line lasted about ten minutes. Our guess is that this may well have been at the request of the signer. Regardless, no one in the queue, or with the wristbands waiting to be called to get their items signed, seemed particuarly upset by the delays; they simply chatted with their neighbors or read their books.
In other words, somewhere in the middle of a Barnes and Noble Bookstore event, a Neil Gaiman signing broke out, and was a pleasure to attend as a signee.
The downside of this, of course, is that its 1:30 AM EST, and I’m concerned that our friend with the fountain pens is still signing away. And this was only Day One.
Other clippings of note:
And now, I am being chased off to bed. Night all.
Anansi Boys is out today in the States. The banner ad’s on top of the Locus home page and everything. But you all know that, yes?
ETA: The AuthorTracker actually indicates that also out today is the Anansi Boys unabridged CD, and MP3 CD, the American Gods MP3 CD, and a few other titles on audio. Who knew?
On the other hand neilgaiman.com doesn’t appear to have undergone any major changes. But I expect to have to cross out that bit shortly. Am looking forward to seeing the new digs, as I’m sure we all are.
What I did notice on the website, however, is that Barnes and Noble is offering a free Anansi Boys online book club ending on November 1st in an online chat with the author. You can sign up at http://educate.barnesandnoble.com/educate/bn/home/catalog/overview.jsp?productId=46626&nhid=bn.
Over in a completely different part of the web, SciFi Wire is reporting that Shia LaBeouf will be involved in the Death: The High Cost of Living (or whatever they are going to finally name it) film.
And Eden, who is good at catching such things, found the following Associated Press story (thank you!):
Stephen King’s new horror story focuses on a set of rampaging zombies controlled by cell phones. One may now bear the last name Huizenga.
King fans around the world spent much of last week on eBay, outbidding each other in an online auction organized by authors selling the rights to name characters in their new novels. Initially conceived as a creative fundraiser for the First Amendment Project, a nonprofit that defends the free speech rights of writers and artists, the auction quickly became the Web site’s most watched item.
As the online auction’s first round closed Sunday night, Pam Alexander of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., won the right to name a character in King’s novel, “CELL,” with a $25,100 bid.
“I thought it would be a great gift to give to my brother to have his name in the book,” said Alexander, whose brother, Ray Huizenga, is a longtime King fan. “It’s definitely extravagant but it’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and he’s worth it.”
Alexander beat out Paul Stegman, of Papillion, Neb., who was poised to take out a credit line on his house to buy a way into King’s head.
“How many times do you have the opportunity to purchase
immortality?” said Stegman, who owns 300 King books.
On Sept. 1, eBay Giving Works, the site’s dedicated program for charity listings, went live with the electronic auction. The auction already has fetched well over the nonprofit’s fundraising goal of $50,000
“We can safely say we’re not going to close now,” said David Greene, executive director of the Oakland-based First Amendment Project. “I’m thrilled.”
The auction’s second phase, which will allow bidders to vie for the chance to name a character in books by John Grisham, Dave Eggers, Neil Gaiman and others continues through Sept. 26.
The benefit was the brainchild of Gaiman, who approached Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon with the idea when he heard the group was running out of money.
It has become the single largest fundraising event for the First Amendment Project, whose lawyers are currently defending a publisher who produces a magazine distributed in prisons and a former sailor seeking information from the U.S. Army.
On the Net:
http://pages.ebay.com/fap/
http://www.thefirstamendment.org/
–Garance Burke.
With five days left to go, the auction bid to beat for the Graveyard Book gravestone is $2700.
The Symphony Space interview with Susanna Clarke (Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell) was very informative and entertaining, and she sounded very much like the sort of person you would want to spend hours chatting with. And you’d figure the interviewer must have been a journalist once upon a time or something, as he asked what I thought were rather insightful questions. Then again, they were also all questions I could think of to ask, so that might just be my bias. She also managed to get the better of him on a few occasions, which as you can expect, was fun to watch. Otherwise, they got along quite amiably.
This is going to sound more like a Livejournal entry than a proper post, because I’m really sleepy. Please bear with.
But needless to say, Paulette Powell (our hostess for the evening, I believe) and Mariah Aguilar certainly know how to throw a party benefit. It felt like the proverbial good time was had by all – at least I hope it was.
Readers included Fly, Neil Swaab, John Holmstrom (who has a Bosko character who is quite different from the Harman & Ising one, as you’ll see), and Kyle Baker (who was dead on both with his New Yorker parody and his explanations of how we market things now).
Neil read The Hidden Chamber, a Bluebeard-ish sort of poem to be included in a new anthology called Outsiders due out in October, and How to Talk to Girls at Parties, a short story that doesn’t have a home as of yet. Like Closing Time in McSweeney’s Mammouth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, it feels semi-autobiographical to a point, but at some point midway in it veers off to points unknown. There’s always enough inklings of reality there to keep the narrative grounded – that’s a hallmark of most of the stories – but you are certainly not any place familiar by the end. It will be interesting to see where the piece lands, and if it changes by the end.
