295- ] English Literature - Jasper Fforde

English Literature

Jasper Fforde

Jasper Forde is an English novelist known for his quirky and inventive novels, most famously the Thursday Next series, which began with The Eyre Affair in 2001. He also authored the Nursery Crime books, the Shades of Grey series, and the Young Adult Last Dragonslayer series.

Career: Before becoming a novelist, Fforde worked in the film industry for 19 years, contributing to movies like Goldeneye and The Mask of Zorro.

Notable works:

Thursday Next series: A popular series about a literary detective who can enter books.

Nursery Crime series: A detective series where classic nursery rhyme characters are investigated, such as in The Big Over Easy where Humpty Dumpty is the victim.

Shades of Grey series: A post-apocalyptic world where society is fragmented by the inability to see in color.

The Last Dragonslayer series: A Young Adult fantasy series about a young woman who manages a company of magicians.

Awards: He won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Writing for The Well of Lost Plots, the second book in the Thursday Next series.

Welcome to the jasper Fforde website, and yes, Jasper Fforde is my real name. I am a British writer who lives in Wales and writes absurdist fiction.

You may notice that this website looks very little like modern websites, and that's because it was written a long time ago in HTML, which your great-grandfather can tell you was the language behind all websites back in 2000, the year when all this began - this website was about the thirty millionth ever registered. Wow. How small the internet was in those days.

The website has gone though many iterations, and has been added to so much over the years that there are now over 1300 pages to explore. Obviously, upgrading all that to a modern bells-and-whistles website would take forever and remove some of the Olde-eWorlde charm, so I have decided to simply leave it as it is, and carry on as I am. It's fine on desktops, most of it will work on tablets, although you may have to do a bit of jiggery-pokery on smartphones to read any articles.

Actually, while I'm talking about HTML, it does allow the relative novice like me to edit and add relatively easily, and if I have an idea for a silliness, the wonders of writing in source code HTML will allow you to do it. If you click on the 'Welcome' and 'This is me' banners above, you'll see what I mean.

So everything we have ever put on the site is still here. Navigation is at best eclectic, but usually logical, so long as you know how an index works and are willing to explore. You'll find lots of stuff, such as an introduction to the Seven Wonders of Swindon, my improved version of Monopoly, a little bit about How To Be A Hamlet, and a whole bunch of Special Features, complete with deleted scenes and 'making of' wordamentaries.

There are also easter eggs in abundance, with lots of unindexed pages to be found, like this error 404 message that pops up when you are looking for Romeo and Juliet. There is even an emergency boss coming facility just in case you get bored at work and don't want to get busted.

I add to the website sporadically as the mood takes me, and should be the first port of call if you want to find stuff out. Yes, agreed, Facebook is a better way to keep everyone totally clued in to what's going on, but there are only so many hours in the day, and I'm not a big facebooker, besides, this is kind of about ownership, too, and adding to stuff that is already here in order to create one huge 'Fforgasbord' of stuff.

Any alerts will be on Threads or Instagram, so if you want to know when there's an update, follow me on those. I also have a Mailchimp database, so if you would like to be s ent emails with news and views, sign up there.

So far, I have written books in four series: The Thursday Next series of which there are seven books, the Nursery Crime series (two), the Last Dragonslayer, series (four) and the Shades of Grey series (two so far out of three). You can have a look at a potted precis of the books. The next published book will be Red Side Story , the long awaited sequel to Shades of Grey. Ive also written two standalones: Early Riser, a thriller set in a world in which humans have always hibernated, and The Constant Rabbit, an allegorical story of racism and xenophobia in UK, also labelled as 'My Brexit Anger Book'. It's about anthropological rabbits living in the UK as a demonised other. It's kinda dark, but I do like it.

The Fforde Grand Central page is probably the best place to start to explore, but the index also covers most things. There is an FAQ page, too, and I also have an eBay page named Ffotographica where you can buy books and stuff.

Enjoy.

Jasper, Dec 2023.

  

294-] English Literature - Jasper Fforde

294- ] English Literature 

Jasper Fforde

Jasper Fforde (born 11 January 1961) is an English novelist whose first novel, The Eyre Affair, was published in 2001. He is known mainly for his Thursday Next novels, but has also published two books in the loosely connected Nursery Crime series, two in the Shades of Grey series and four in The Last Dragonslayer series. Fforde's books abound in literary allusions and wordplay, tightly scripted plots and playfulness with the conventional, traditional genres. They usually contain elements of metafiction, parody, and fantasy.

Early life

Fforde was born in London on 11 January 1961, the son of John Standish Fforde, the 24th Chief Cashier for the Bank of England. He is a grandson of the Polish political activist, Joseph Retinger, and a great-grandson of the journalist E. D. Morel.

Fforde was educated at Dartington Hall School. In his first jobs, he worked as a focus puller in the film industry. He worked on a number of films, including The Trial, Quills, GoldenEye, The Mask of Zorro, and Entrapment.

Novels

Fforde's published books include a series of novels starring the literary detective Thursday Next: The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rotten, First Among Sequels, One of Our Thursdays Is Missing and The Woman Who Died a Lot. The Eyre Affair had received 76 publisher rejections before its eventual acceptance for publication.

Fforde won the Wodehouse prize for comic fiction in 2004 for The Well of Lost Plots. Several streets in the Thames Reach housing development in Swindon have been named after characters in the series.

The Big Over Easy (2005), set in the same alternative universe as the Next novels, reworks his first written novel, which initially failed to find a publisher. Its original title was Who Killed Humpty Dumpty? It was later entitled Nursery Crime, which now refers to the series of books. These describe the investigations of DCI Jack Spratt. The follow-up to The Big Over Easy, The Fourth Bear, was published in July 2006 and focuses on Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

Shades of Grey, the first novel in a new series, was published December 2009 in the United States and January 2010 in the United Kingdom. The sequel Red Side Story was published in February 2024 in the United Kingdom and May the same year in the United States.

In November 2010 Fforde produced The Last Dragonslayer, the first novel in a new series. It is a young-adult fantasy novel about a teenage orphan Jennifer Strange which has been adapted for television. Two more books have been published in the series, The Song of the Quarkbeast (2011) and The Eye of Zoltar (2014). The series was originally planned as a trilogy, but a fourth book in the series was announced in 2014, The Great Troll War (2021).

Short stories

In 2009, Fforde published a story in the Welsh edition of Big Issue magazine called "We are all alike" (previously "The Man with no Face").

He also published "The Locked Room Mystery mystery" [sic] in The Guardian newspaper in 2007; this story remains available online. The U.S. version of Well of Lost Plots features a bonus chapter (34b) called "Heavy Weather", a complete story in itself, featuring Thursday Next in her position as Bellman.

Fforde Ffiesta

Originating with the Fforde Ffestival in September 2005, the Fforde Ffiesta (cf. Ford Fiesta) is a bi-annual event built around Fforde's books and held in Thursday Next's home town of Swindon over the May bank holiday weekend. People travel from afar to take part in a wide range of events, including a reenactment of the gameshow Name That Fruit, Hamlet Speed Reading competitions, and interactive performances of Richard III.

Bibliography

Thursday Next

The Eyre Affair (2001)

Lost in a Good Book (2002)

The Well of Lost Plots (2003)

Something Rotten (2004)

First Among Sequels (2007)

One of Our Thursdays is Missing (2011)

The Woman Who Died a Lot (2012)

Dark Reading Matter (2026)

Nursery Crime Division

The Big Over Easy (2005)

The Fourth Bear (2006)

Shades of Grey

Shades of Grey (2009)

Red Side Story (2024)

The Dragonslayer

The Last Dragonslayer (2010)

The Song of the Quarkbeast (2011)

The Eye of Zoltar (2014)

The Great Troll War (2021)

Standalone Novels

Early Riser (2018)

The Constant Rabbit (2020)