Men only! These stories are not for girls.

This is a very fine collection of stories, truly superior in content, description and outstanding in quality. The narrators are all excellent. But I just want to make listeners aware of a minor detail I wish I'd known before purchasing. I should have realised really, seeing as all the writers and editors are men. These stories are all aimed at men.
Speaking as a woman (who loves writers like Jodi Picoult) this unfortunately meant that the subjects and content of the stories held limited interest for me. Guns, killing, male sex, testosterone. There are several vampire themed stories.
I just wish the editors had perhaps considered that half of their audience are women, and by alienating them this way, they halve their readership and thus their profits. Either that or insert a disclaimer or something in the blurb that states the fact that all these stories are likely to appeal to men rather than women. If this isn't the intention, I would advise them to get a woman on the editorial committee and stick just a few stories in there that might appeal to us ladies too.

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1 person found this helpful

A mixed bag

Some stories were excellent, others okay and some were baffling and/or monotonous. Some were so bad I pitied the narrator! But still the collection was worth the credit for the few gems it contained.

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Licorice Allsorts without the nasty blue ones

Pleasantly surprised by this collection. I listen to and read lots of short stories in collections and am used to either coming across the same good but overly familiar standards being included (when you've heard them so many times you just skip them) or else having lots of duds included with one or two good yarns. Neither sin is committed here. Great tales, well told.

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1 person found this helpful

Gaimen entertains again

I am a great fan of Neil Gaiman so I had to listen to the stories as soon as possible. The audiobook is read by a host of different people which helped to keep me interested in the many different stories.

The biggest disappointment for me was that Gaiman does not read his own story which is one the best in the book. I feel that Gaiman adds somthing to his stories when he reads them.

Overall I felt that the book had many more great stories than poor ones but there where a few that I felt like fast forwarding through.

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12 people found this helpful

All new, all memorable

Weeks after listening to the book, stories and scenes keep on coming back to me. This is an artful collection of short stories, selected not around a genre or theme, but around the idea that good stories hold a magical power to create worlds in the reader' s mind, regardless of their subject matter.
OK, there may have been a couple that I wished were shorter stories, and one I wished wasn't there at all, and for that I'd have dropped it to four stars ... but then the choice of readers and their engagement with the texts was so enjoyable, I put the missing star back in again just for the audio experience of it.

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7 people found this helpful

Stronger on ambition than achievement

This is the first short story collection I've downloaded on Audible and while a few of the stories have made it feel worthwhile, there were a good many that didn't. For me, the most successful ones seemed to follow in a kind of folk tradition - The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains, The Stars are Falling and The Devil on the Staircase all have an eerie resonance while The Therapist and The Cult of the Nose have more of an urban legend feel. These 5 stories are the page-turners the editors claim for the collection - the others, with the possible exception of Elizabeth Hand's atmospheric Bellerophon, failed to sustain my interest.

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3 people found this helpful

Great stories all captivating

Great stories all so different and very enjoyable. The narration was superb more like this please....

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1 person found this helpful

Don't be fooled by Neil Gaiman's name on this!

What disappointed you about Stories?

Most of the stories were complete bilge - depressing, uninspiring with few likable characters. And actually most of the stories were pretty similar. The benefit of a collection of short stories is that if you don't like one, you can skip to the next. But in this case, the next was usually just the same.

What could the authors have done to make this a more enjoyable book for you?

Better selection of stories, better readings

What didn’t you like about the narrators’s performance?

Many were read in a flat monotone American accent, which even played at 1.25x speed was still dull.

You didn’t love this book--but did it have any redeeming qualities?

There are a couple of very good stories - in particular the one by Neil Gaiman, but that does not warrant the purchase of the whole collection

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5 people found this helpful

starts off strong but quickly becomes boring

too abstract and repetitive. great if you want to say "I read something weird" but not good if you want to get lost in a story. there's at least two stories where the twist is it was Santa all along.

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1 person found this helpful

Confusion

Most of these tales left me confused as to what their point was. One that I did really enjoy was Samantha's Journal which kept me smiling and even made me giggle at times. A few others were quite good but considering Neil Gaiman has his name associated with the compilation of these tales I expected more!

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1 person found this helpful