fool

About the author

Christopher Moore is the author of eleven novels, including the international bestsellers, Lamb, A Dirty Job and You Suck. His latest novel is Fool, a retelling of King Lear from the perspective of Pocket, the Fool.

Chris was born in Toledo, Ohio and grew up in Mansfield, Ohio. His father was a highway patrolman and his mother sold major appliances at a department store. He attended Ohio State University and Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara. He moved to California when he was 19 years old and lived on the Central Coast until 2003, when he moved to Hawaii.

Before publishing his first novel, Practical Demonkeeping in 1992, he worked as a roofer, a grocery clerk, a hotel night auditor, and insurance broker, a waiter, a photographer, and a rock and roll DJ. Chris has drawn on all of these work experiences to create the characters in his books. When he’s not writing, Chris enjoys ocean kayaking, scuba diving, photography, and sumi-e ink painting. He divides his time between Hawaii and San Francisco.

Source: www.chrismoore.com

About Fool

Christopher Moore talks about Fool:

"Fool is the story of King Lear from the point of view of the fool (who is a very minor character in William Shakespeare’s original play), in which this diminutive and powerless little guy sort of pulls the strings of the royals of England. He’s a horn dog and a rascal, but also very brave and very funny. So it’s basically the story of a King of England who disowns his favorite daughter, then splits his kingdom between his remaining two daughters, who are less than virtuous. Hijinks ensue. He was also terribly hard to write, because he speaks in a British dialect, not something that came natural to me."

"Pocket started with the Shakespeare character of the Fool. But I sort of expanded his history and personality, first by getting to know many of the plays, so I got of sense of the sort of banter Shakespeare wrote for his more rascally characters, and later by reading a lot of books on British slang, both contemporary and historical, to work the idiom into Pocket's speech. Language was a big part of his character. As for life in historical Britain, I took a couple of trips to England, and one to France, where I mainly looked at medieval sites: castles, walled cities, cathedrals, etc. There are still quite a few places where you can get a feel for how people must have lived back then."

Source: Sojourn, a Journal of the Arts (the Arts magazine at the University of Texas)