Clippings

The Ark production of The Day I Swapped My Day for Two Goldfish is up for an Irish Times Theatre Award for best production.

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From a January 15th Baltimore Sun interview with Barb Langridge, facilitator of the We’re Bookin’ book club at Central Library:

Which book have the kids most liked, so far?
Coraline by Neil Gaiman. It has a touch of The Twilight Zone and Alice in Wonderland mixed together. It’s about a 10-year-old girl, who is sort of neglected by her parents. She walks through a mirror and meets some seemingly perfect parents, but it turns out they don’t have her best interests at heart. It’s kind of spooky. The kids in our group really had strong feelings about what good parents should be like and were highly critical of the job done by the parents in this book.

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Chivalry is reprinted in the anthology New Magics, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

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Sean Jaffe reviewed 1602 in PopMatters on January 14th.

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Mark Russell reported the following Endless Nights review in the January 11th Pittsburgh Post Gazette:

Unlike the previous collections, “The Sandman: Endless Nights” (DC Comics, $24.95, ages 16 and up) is a self-contained work that did not appear first in serial comic form. While “The Sandman” was indeed an ongoing series, Neil Gaiman ended it at issue 75 in 1996.

Since then he has written best-selling novels and worked on screenplays. Luckily for “Sandman” fans, every now and then he writes a new story about his signature character, Dream.

“Endless Nights” is a collection of seven stories about Dream and his siblings Destiny, Desire, Delirium, Despair, Destruction and Death; collectively known as The Endless.

Each story focuses on one particular family member, and to tell these tales Gaiman has enlisted an impressive group of artists.

The most potent tale in this collection is “Fifteen Portraits of Despair,” told by Gaiman with art by Barron Storey and Dave McKean. The sparse, heartbreaking prose exists amidst a series of gruesome, chaotic art panels, evoking simultaneous pain and beauty.

Certainly, this volume is not for the casual reader, and prior knowledge of “The Sandman” is helpful, although not necessary. The intensity and complexity of the stories may seem intimidating, but ultimately they are worth the investment.