Smoke and Mirrors (story collection)

Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions is a collection of short stories and poems by Neil Gaiman. It was first published in the US in 1998, and in the UK in 1999.

Many of the stories in this book are reprints from other sources, such as magazines, anthologies, and collections (including ten stories and poems from Gaiman's earlier small press miscellany Angels and Visitations).

Contents

The included stories and poems are different between some of the editions. The US, UK, and eBook editions have some differences in the stories they contain (see table to right):

• Reading the Entrails: A Rondel
• The Wedding Present (in the introduction)
• Chivalry
• Nicholas Was...
• The Price
• Troll Bridge
• Don't Ask Jack
• The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories
• Eaten (Scenes from a Moving picture) ^†
• The White Road
• Queen of Knives (for Eric Stern's opera of the same name see Queen of Knives)
• The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch ^†‡
• Changes
• The Daughter of Owls
• Shoggoth's Old Peculiar
• Virus
• Looking for the Girl
• Only the End of the World Again
• Bay Wolf
• Fifteen Painted Cards from a Vampire Tarot ^†
• We Can Get Them For You Wholesale
• One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock
• Cold Colours
• The Sweeper of Dreams
• Foreign Parts
• Vampire Sestina
• Mouse
• The Sea Change
• How Do You Think It Feels? ^†‡
• When We Went to See the End of the World by Dawnie Morningside, age 11¼
• Desert Wind
• Tastings
• In the End ^†*
• Babycakes
• Murder Mysteries
• Snow, Glass, Apples

Translations

• Dym i lustra (Polish), ISBN 83-87968-54-4

• Fumaça e Espelhos (Portuguese), ISBN 8586932620

• Tükör és Füst (Hungarian), ISBN 963-85914-9-8

• Die Messerkönigin (German), ISBN 3-453-17798-3 (named after the translated title of the included short story Queen of Knives); also released a 3-disc audio-book of the same title (containing 6 of the short stories), ISBN 978-3-7857-3746-0