Short Stories by Neil Gaiman

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This unit on selected short stories by Neil Gaiman is designed to…

  • develop close reading skills.
  • engage students in critical thinking about why writers use “the strange” and “the surreal” to explore ideas and issues related to the human experience.
  • develop an appreciation for stylistic choices that support the genre and consider their ambiguous meanings.
  • compare short stories and their remediation into film.
  • give students an opportunity to independently apply their understanding of the genre and their reading skills by selecting a few short stories or a novella by Neil Gaiman to explore on their own.

Teaching Resources

Gaiman Activity Portfolio
Gaiman Activity Portfolio

A Note about the Resources

The Stories
The stories in the activity log are all taken from the collection Fragile Things. They include: “How to Talk to Girls at Parties”, “October in the Chair”, “Feeders and Eaters”, and “Closing Time”.

The Remediated Short Films
In 2016, Gaiman collaboratively worked to remediate a few of his short stories into short films (trailer above). Two of the stories in these resources, “Feeders and Eaters” and “Closing Time” include activities that have students compare the short stories to their remediated versions.

The short films are available for purchase on Amazon in a collection entitled Likely Stories, but not in all countries. When they were first released, they were available on the US iTunes Store but have since been removed. If anyone has any leads on where others can find them, please provide more information in the comments.

Choice
The unit ends with students applying their understanding of the genre and their close reading and analysis skills to Gaiman’s other stories and presenting on a single story. Gaiman’s works are catalogued on his website, but the titles will require some teacher vetting because he also writes children’s stories. Some of his novella’s are on the border between YA Lit and adult literature (like Coraline and The Graveyard Book), but would be good for a 9th/10th grade class. Other works (like his short story collections, American Gods, and The Sandman) deal with more mature ideas and are linguistically more complex.

Image by Inactive_account_ID_249 from Pixabay

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