From #1 New York Times bestselling author Neil Gaiman, an outstanding array of short fiction that surveys the terrain between the illusory and the ordinary and reveals the terrors and wonders reflected in the funhouse mirrors of our dreams―one of ten classic Gaiman works repackaged with elegant original watercolor art by acclaimed artist Henry Sene Yee "He is a treasure-house of story, and we are lucky to have him." --Stephen King Spanning the realms of dark imagination, Smoke and Mirrors surveys the terrain between the illusory and the ordinary, treating readers to a gift of wonder and delight from one of the most unique literary artists of our time. The miraculous inventions contained herein - stories, novellas, and poems - reveal Gaiman to be a writer of immense talent and sophisticated invention. In his deft hands, magic is no mere illusion, but a powerful means of illumination, revelation, and reflection on what it means to be human. Poignant and haunting, humorous and unorthodox, Smoke and Mirrors is an outstanding array of short fiction from one of the world's most distinguished literary masters.

In France, on the eve of the Revolution, a young man named Claude Page sets out to become the most ingenious and daring inventor of his time. In the course of a career filled with violence and passion, Claude learns the arts of enameling and watchmaking from an irascible, defrocked abbé, apprentices himself to a pornographic bookseller, and applies his erotic erudition to the seduction of the wife of an impotent wigmaker. But it is Claude's greatest device-a talking mechanical head-that both crowns his career and leads to an execution as tragic as that of Marie Antoinette, and far more bizarre. Hailed by critics for the shimmering brilliance of its inventions and its uncanny fidelity to the textures of the past, A Case of Curiosities places Allen Kurzweil securely in the ranks of the finest literary artists of our time.