Search

The Online Encyclopedia and Dictionary

 
     
 

Encyclopedia

Dictionary

Quotes

 

American Gods

American Gods is a novel by Neil Gaiman. The novel is an ambitious blend of Americana, fantasy and various strands of mythology centering on a mysterious and taciturn protagonist, Shadow. It was, approximately, Gaiman's fifth novel, being preceded by Good Omens (a collaboration with Terry Pratchett), Neverwhere, and Stardust (a fairy tale illustrated by Charles Vess), and The Sandman graphic novel series, (collectively), for which he is best known.

The book was published in 2001 by Headline in the UK and by William Morrow in the United States. It has won the 2002 Hugo, Nebula and Bram Stoker awards, all for Best Novel. It was also nominated for Best Novel in the 2002 BSFA Award.

While Gaiman was writing American Gods, his publishers set up a promotional web site featuring a weblog in which Gaiman described the day-to-day process of writing (and then revising, publishing, promoting) the novel. After the novel was published, the web site evolved into a more general Official Neil Gaiman Web Site, and as of 2004 Gaiman still regularly adds to the weblog, describing the day-to-day process of being Neil Gaiman and writing, revising, publishing, or promoting whatever the current project is.


Mythological characters represented in the book include Wednesday (Odin), Czernobog, Anansi, Mama-ji (Kali), Mr. Ibis (Thoth), and Mr. Jaquel (Anubis).

According to Gaiman: American Gods is not based on Diana Wynne Jones's Eight Days of Luke "although they bear an odd relationship, like second cousins once removed or something." When working on the structure of a story linking Gods and days of the week, he realised that this idea had already been done in Eight Days of Luke. So he abandoned the idea, but later used the character Wednesday and the day of meeting when writing American Gods.

External links

Last updated: 10-22-2005 02:32:21
The contents of this article are licensed from Wikipedia.org under the GNU Free Documentation License. How to see transparent copy