Jasper Fforde

From Free net encyclopedia

Image:Jasper-Fforde-publicity-portrait.jpg Jasper Fforde (born in London on January 11 1961) is a novelist and aviator living in Wales.

His early career was spent as a focus puller in the movie industry. His published books are a series of novels starring Thursday Next: The Eyre Affair (2001), Lost in a Good Book (2002), The Well of Lost Plots (2003), and Something Rotten (2004). The Big Over Easy (2005), which shares a setting with the Next novels, is a reworking of his first written novel, which initially failed to find a publisher. It had the working title of Nursery Crimes. The next projected novel in that series is The Fourth Bear, due to be published in July 2006, which focuses on Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

Mr Fforde's books are noted for the number of literary allusions, wordplay and the tightly scripted plot, and also the impossibility of deciding which genre they fit into. The simple answer is that they don't, although they all have elements of metafiction, parody, and fantasy.

Mr Fforde should also be noted for his use of the internet to add a different level to the books at ThursdayNext.com and talks directly to his fans through comments on the Fforum, which has attracted a small community producing parodies and nonsense roughly connected to the 'Nextian Universe'.

Another way to engage readers has been through the insertion of rogue postcards into copies of the books which now sell for not inconsiderable sums, as well as guerilla signings, which often confuse purchasers of his books.

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