neil gaiman fragile things table of contents

Eventually I began to gather together the material of this book, puzzling over what I should call it now that the previous title seemed no longer to apply. One story refused to take shape until I gave it to the months of the year to tell, while another did small, efficient things with identity that meant it had to be told in the third person.

That was the idea and then real life came along and spoiled it, as I began to write the short stories you’ll find in here, and they took on the form they needed to be told in, and while some were told in the first person and were slices of lives, others simply weren’t.

My original plan for this book of tales and imaginings, some eight years ago, was to create a short story collection that I would call These People Ought to Know Who We Are and Tell That We Were Here, after a word balloon in a panel from a Little Nemo Sunday page (you can now find a beautiful color reproduction of the page in Art Spiegelman’s book In the Shadow of No Towers), and every story would be told by one of a variety of dodgy and unreliable narrators as each explained their life, told us who they were and that, once, they too were here.

FRAGILE THINGS S HORT F ICTIONS AND W ONDERS NEIL GAIMAN For Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison, and the late Robert Sheckley, masters of the craft CONTENTS Introduction A Study in Emerald The Fairy Reel October in the Chair The Hidden Chamber Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire The Flints of Memory Lane Closing Time Going Wodwo Bitter Grounds Other People Keepsakes and Treasures Good Boys Deserve Favors The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch Strange Little Girls Harlequin Valentine Locks The Problem of Susan Instructions How Do You Think It Feels? My Life Fifteen Painted Cards from a Vampire Tarot Feeders and Eaters Diseasemaker’s Croup In the End Goliath Pages from a Journal Found in a Shoebox Left in a Greyhound Bus Somewhere Between Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Louisville, Kentucky How to Talk to Girls at Parties The Day the Saucers Came Sunbird Inventing Aladdin The Monarch of the Glen About the Author Other Books by Neil Gaiman Credits Copyright About the Publisher INTRODUCTION “I think…that I would rather recollect a life misspent on fragile things than spent avoiding moral debt.” The words turned up in a dream and I wrote them down upon waking, uncertain what they meant or to whom they applied.

Neil gaiman fragile things table of contents