Neil Gaiman

The New Yorker has a profile of Neil Gaiman, one of Carmen's favorite authors. I've liked everything of his I've read (or seen), but don't want to have favorite authors. The profile is fascinating if you are familiar with him, and odd enough to make you read something of his if you aren't. Here's my favorite quote, combining several authors who would be my favorite authors if I had any.

The writer Gene Wolfe says that “Sunbird,” Gaiman’s story about an epicurean club that eats the mythical phoenix, “is so much in the style of R. A. Lafferty it’s almost as if Lafferty were dictating it from Heaven.”

He was a kid I can relate to:

As a child, he was bookish and broody; for his tenth birthday, he asked for a shed and got a kit of pine boards, which his parents assembled at the bottom of the garden. It was where he read: the Narnia books; Roger Lancelyn Green; a neighbor’s father’s “Dracula”; Chesterton, borrowed from the library. Instead of studying for his bar mitzvah, he persuaded his instructor to teach him Bible stories—the Behemoth, the Leviathan—and the secret teachings, about Lilith and the Lilim, which he used in “The Sandman.” To his father’s dismay, he spent his bar-mitzvah money on American comics—a good investment, as he sees it now.

He started out writing the comic book "Sandman" ... and has an arresting way to describe its success:

“Sandman,” Gaiman says, is sexually transmitted. “Guys who wanted their girlfriends to read comics would give them ‘Sandman.’ They’d break up, and the girl would take the ‘Sandman’s and infect the next guy. It grew on a vector.”

A strange fellow. Maybe I should read more of him.


he could become my favorite author with an English accent who wears black.