American Gods by Neil Gaiman follows Shadow, a man who, after spending three years in prison, returns home to find his wife has died in an accident. Lost and adrift, Shadow meets the mysterious Mr. Wednesday, who hires him for a job that leads them on a dangerous journey across America. Along the way, Shadow encounters gods and mythological beings, each with their own agendas and secrets. As he unravels the truth about his wife, himself, and the larger conflict at play, Shadow becomes entangled in a war for the soul of America, where the stakes are higher than he ever imagined.
Please note that the author of this book has put in a lot of effort in writing this book. It will be a good gesture and a show of support and love to buy the paperback version of American Gods after downloading and reading the free pdf version you have downloaded from here.
Summary of American Gods pdf Neil Gaiman
The storm was coming….
Shadow spent three years in prison, keeping his head down, doing his time. All he wanted was to get back to the loving arms of his wife and to stay out of trouble for the rest of his life. But days before his scheduled release, he learns that his wife has been killed in an accident, and his world becomes a colder place.
On the plane ride home to the funeral, Shadow meets a grizzled man who calls himself Mr. Wednesday. A self-styled grifter and rogue, Wednesday offers Shadow a job. And Shadow, a man with nothing to lose, accepts.
But working for the enigmatic Wednesday is not without its price, and Shadow soon learns that his role in Wednesday’s schemes will be far more dangerous than he ever could have imagined. Entangled in a world of secrets, he embarks on a wild road trip and encounters, among others, the murderous Czernobog, the impish Mr. Nancy, and the beautiful Easter — all of whom seem to know more about Shadow than he himself does.
Shadow will learn that the past does not die, that everyone, including his late wife, had secrets, and that the stakes are higher than anyone could have imagined.
All around them a storm of epic proportions threatens to break. Soon Shadow and Wednesday will be swept up into a conflict as old as humanity itself. For beneath the placid surface of everyday life a war is being fought — and the prize is the very soul of America.
As unsettling as it is exhilarating, American Gods is a dark and kaleidoscopic journey deep into myth and across an America at once eerily familiar and utterly alien. Magnificently told, this work of literary magic will haunt the reader far beyond the final page.
About the Author of American Gods – Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman was born in Hampshire, UK, and now lives in the United States near Minneapolis. As a child he discovered his love of books, reading, and stories, devouring the works of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, James Branch Cabell, Edgar Allan Poe, Michael Moorcock, Ursula K. LeGuin, Gene Wolfe, and G.K. Chesterton. A self-described “feral child who was raised in libraries,” Gaiman credits librarians with fostering a life-long love of reading: “I wouldn’t be who I am without libraries. I was the sort of kid who devoured books, and my happiest times as a boy were when I persuaded my parents to drop me off in the local library on their way to work, and I spent the day there. I discovered that librarians actually want to help you: they taught me about interlibrary loans.”
Gaiman began his writing career in England as a journalist. His first book was a Duran Duran biography that took him three months to write, and his second was a biography of Douglas Adams, Don’t Panic: The Official Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Companion. Gaiman describes his early writing: “I was very, very good at taking a voice that already existed and parodying or pastiching it.” Violent Cases was the first of many collaborations with artist Dave McKean. This early graphic novel led to their series Black Orchid, published by DC Comics.
Neil Gaiman is a #1 New York Times bestselling author of books for children and adults whose award-winning titles include Norse Mythology, American Gods, The Graveyard Book, Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett), Coraline, and The Sandman graphic novels. He is a Goodwill Ambassador for UNHCR and Professor in the Arts at Bard College.
Vital information About the Book American Gods (Amazon)
- Publisher : William Morrow; 1st edition (June 19, 2001)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 480 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0380973650
- ISBN-13 : 978-0380973651
- Lexile measure : 840L
- Item Weight : 1.48 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.12 x 1.45 x 9.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #175,326 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,863 in Mythology & Folk Tales (Books)
- #4,611 in Fantasy Action & Adventure
- #12,176 in Paranormal & Urban Fantasy (Books)
- Customer Reviews: 4.5 out of 5 stars 13,898 ratings
Characters in American Gods pdf by Neil Gaiman
Shadow Moon:
Tis the main protagonist of American Gods. Shadow has many roles. Gaiman has created a character who, by all appearances, seems to be an average, somewhat uninteresting guy. As we read the novel, Shadow’s character become more and more complex and we realize how he is the pivot on which the story turns. It is alluded to that he is a Shaman because he can do things like make it snow, he can see people who are far away in his mind and know what they are doing, he has conversations with a buffalo headed man when he is dreaming, and people tell him several time that he looks Native American.
Near the end of the book, while Shadow is hanging on the World Tree, he has a vision of Wednesday and his mother getting together. Through this vision Shadow discovers that he is Odin’s son. Of all of Odin’s sons it seems most likely that Shadow is Baldr, the “shining God” and the good son. Baldr is the son who’s personality most matches the personality of Shadow. We know he is not Loki the mischievouse, because Loki also appears in the novel as Wednesday’s co-conspirator in the staged war between the old Gods and the new Gods. Baldr was considered to be the image of perfection. Several times throughout the book Shadow catches Wednesday doing something Shadow would consider bad or unfair to someone, and he stops him, or lectures him about doing harm. Shadow proves himself to be very brave when he takes on the burden of hanging from the World Tree to perform Wednesday’s vigil. In the end, Shadow is the one who figures out the two-man con and stops the war. It is also interesting that Shadow’s last name is Moon because Baldr as known as the “shining one” and is associated with the day-time and the sun. Could this be a metaphor that Shadow’s name is representing a shadow of what once was? As if the sun has set on the old Gods, and now they are in their moon phase?
Old Gods:
A few of the old Gods that show up in this novel include Odin, Anansi, Chernobog, Ibis and Anubis, Thoth, Bast, Wisakedjak, Shiva, Zorya, Easter, and Kobold. These Gods are Gods of the immigrants. Jesus and the Greek Gods are not represented in this novel. The old Gods are our teachers in many ways. They are meant to teach us how to be good and virtuous, and many of them are meant to teach us what not to be or do. The old Gods are meant to empower us, and teach us of the ways of nature. They represent both the cruelty and the beauty of nature. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty’s book Hindu Myth is quoted in an introduction to chapter 17.
The New Gods:
These are the the things we worship in contemporary society. The new Gods who show up in this novel are Media, Technology Boy, Mr. World, and several others. When Wednesday is giving a sermon to Shadow and the Old Gods explaining why they should all join the war, he say, “Now, as all of you will have had reason aplenty to discover them for yourselves, there are new Gods growing in America, clinging to growing knots of belief: new gods of credit card and freeway, of Internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and of beeper and of neon. Proud Gods, fat and foolish creatures, puffed up with their own newness and importance.” (123).
In his plea to the old Gods, Mr. Wednesday has given us the most accurate and by far the best portrayal of the new Gods as they are explained by Gaiman. Mr. World is meant to represent the new world culture. It used to be that humanity was centered around small towns, villages or tribes. Now we have a global community. We are connected to that global community through our dependance on the internet and technology.
Excerpt from American Gods pdf by Neil Gaiman
PART ONE
shadows
Chapter One
The boundaries of our country, sir? Why sir, onto the north we are bounded by the Aurora Borealis, on the east we are bounded by the rising sun, on the south we are bounded by the procession of the Equinoxes, and on the west by the Day of Judgement.
—“The American” Joe Miller’s Jest Book
Shadow had done three years in prison. He was big enough, and looked don’t-f**k-with-me enough that his biggest problem was killing time. So he kept himself in shape, and taught himself coin tricks, and thought a lot about how much he loved his wife.
The best thing—in Shadow’s opinion, perhaps the only good thing—about being in prison was a feeling of relief. The feeling that he’d plunged as low as he could plunge and he’d hit bottom. He didn’t worry that the man was going to get him, because the man had got him. He did not awake in prison with a feeling of dread; he was no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, because yesterday had brought it. It did not matter, Shadow decided, if you had done what you had been convicted of or not. In his experience everyone he met in prison was aggrieved about something: there was always something the authorities had got wrong, something they said you did when you didn’t—or you didn’t do quite like they said you did. What was important was that they had got you. He had noticed it in the first few days, when everything, from the slang to the bad food, was new. Despite the misery and the utter skincrawling horror of incarceration, he was breathing relief.
Shadow tried not to talk too much. Somewhere around the middle of year two he mentioned his theory to Low Key Lyesmith, his cellmate. Low Key, who was a grifter from Minnesota, smiled his scarred smile. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s true. It’s even better when you’ve been sentenced to death. That’s when you remember the jokes about the guys who kicked their boots off as the noose flipped around their necks, because their friends always told them they’d die with their boots on.” “Is that a joke?” asked Shadow. “Damn right. Gallows humor. Best kind there is—bang, the worst has happened. You get a few days for it to sink in, then you’re riding the cart on your way to do the dance on nothing.” “When did they last hang a man in this state?” asked Shadow.
“How the hell should I know?” Lyesmith kept his orange-blond hair pretty much shaved. You could see the lines of his skull. “Tell you what, though. This country started going to hell when they stopped hanging folks. No gallows dirt. No gallows deals.”
Shadow shrugged. He could see nothing romantic in a death sentence. If you didn’t have a death sentence, he decided, then prison was, at best, only a temporary reprieve from life, for two reasons. First, life creeps back into prison. There are always places to go further down, even when you’ve been taken off the board; life goes on, even if it’s life under a microscope or life in a cage. And second, if you just hang in there, some day they’re going to have to let you out. In the beginning it was too far away for Shadow to focus on. Then it became a distant beam of hope, and he learned how to tell himself “this too shall pass” when the prison shit went down, as prison shit always did. One day the magic door would open and he’d walk through it. So he marked off the days on his Songbirds of North America calendar, which was the only calendar they sold in the prison commissary, and the sun went down and he didn’t see it and the sun came up and he didn’t see it. He practiced coin tricks from a book he found in the wasteland of the prison library; and he worked out; and he made lists in his head of what he’d do when he got out of prison.
Shadow’s lists got shorter and shorter. After two years he had it down to three things. First, he was going to take a bath. A real, long, serious soak, in a tub with bubbles in it. Maybe read the paper, maybe not. Some days he thought one way, some days the other. Second he was going to towel himself off, put on a robe. Maybe slippers. He liked the idea of slippers. If he smoked he would be smoking a pipe about now, but he didn’t smoke. He would pick up his wife in his arms (“Puppy,” she would squeal in mock horror and real delight, “what are you doing?”). He would carry her into the bedroom, and close the door. They’d call out for pizzas if they got hungry. Third, after he and Laura had come out of the bedroom, maybe a couple of days later, he was going to keep his head down and stay out of trouble for the rest of his life. “And then you’ll be happy?” asked Low Key Lyesmith. That day they were working in the prison shop, assembling bird feeders, which was barely more interesting than stamping out license plates.
“Call no man happy,” said Shadow, “until he is dead.” “Herodotus,” said Low Key. “Hey. You’re learning.” “Who the f**k’s Herodotus?” asked the Iceman, slotting together the sides of a bird feeder, and passing it to Shadow, who bolted and screwed it tight. “Dead Greek,” said Shadow. “My last girlfriend was Greek,” said the Iceman. “The shit her family ate. You would not believe. Like rice wrapped in leaves. Shit like that.” The Iceman was the same size and shape as a Coke machine, with blue eyes and hair so blond it was almost white. He had beaten the crap out of some guy who had made the mistake of copping a feel off his girlfriend in the bar where she danced and the Iceman bounced. The guy’s friends had called the police, who arrested the Iceman and ran a check on him, which revealed that the Iceman had walked from a work-release program eighteen months earlier.
“So what was I supposed to do?” asked the Iceman, aggrieved, when he had told Shadow the whole sad tale. “I’d told him she was my girlfriend. Was I supposed to let him disrespect me like that? Was I? I mean, he had his hands all over her.” Shadow had said something meaningless, like “You tell ’em,” and left it at that. One thing he had learned early, you do your own time in prison. You don’t do anyone else’s time for them. Keep your head down. Do your own time.
Where to Buy American Gods by Neil Gaiman Online
Look no further as buying the paperback of American Gods by Neil Gaiman is pretty easy and can be done using the following sites:
Amazon.com
barnesandnoble.com
thriftbooks.com
goodreads.com
Download American Gods pdf by Neil Gaiman
Use the button below to download the eBook American Gods pdf by Neil Gaiman free and after reading the book, consider buying the paperback version.
You can also check out these great titles below
- The Name of the Wind pdf by Patrick Rothfuss, Download Free
Game of Thrones PDF by George R.R Martin, Reviews and More
Verity Colleen Hoover PDF Free Download Online, Read & Buy
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone pdf by J.K Rowling
