Shop > The Eclectic Attic > Books and Literature > Stephen Fry :

10 ideas in this category:

Click Here To See More Details Or Purchase This Item The Hippopotamus (Paperback) by Stephen Fry At the request of his godchild Jane, Ted Wallace visits an old friend's lavish English estate to check up on his other godchild, 15-year-old Davey, who is experimenting with faith healing. Ted, a failed poet, husband, father, and more, joins a strange group of guests at Swafford Hall. The guests drink and converse while Ted seeks to make sense of some rather bizarre goings-on. He solves the puzzle and inherits a fortune. Marvelous dialog enlivens a tale that is fraught with incest, bestiality, and English humor. Obviously, only for special tastes; purchase according to demand. [Author/actor Fry (The Liar, LJ 4/15/93) stars in I.Q., a Para-mount film that will be released early next year.-Ed.]-Robert H. Donahugh, formerly with Youngstown & Mahoning Cty. P.L., Ohi. --Robert H. Donahugh, formerly with Youngstown & Mahoning Cty. P.L., Ohio Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Click Here To See More Details Or Purchase This Item Moab Is My Washpot (Paperback) by Stephen Fry Fry, well known for his television roles in the British comedies Jeeves and Wooster and Blackadder, continues to entertain in this fresh and hilarious boyhood memoir. Fry spent his childhood in the English public school system and unapologetically defends the system as an institution. His hindsight provides witty entertainment in this gay coming-of-age story that will delight readers. Fans of British comedies especially will appreciate the style and wit with which Fry tells his tale. In touching upon his rocky childhood, Fry provides a picture of himself as extraordinarily clever, to the point of being boisterously wicked. He used comedy to cover up what could be considered repressed brilliance, in addition to covering up his homosexuality. An affair with a fellow school chum only furthered his inhibitions, as he wove a downward destructive spiral of deceit and thievery that ended in near-suicide and eventual imprisonment. And this all occurred before his first year at Cambridge. With this daring and feisty story, Fry will delight fans and nonfans. Michael Spinella --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Click Here To See More Details Or Purchase This Item The Liar (Paperback) by Stephen Fry British comedian and actor Fry (currently appearing in Kenneth Branagh's Peter's Friends ) has written a witty first novel about the adventures of Adrian Healey, a British schoolboy and "the liar" of the title. Adrian is an amusing, if appalling, character, and readers will enjoy following him as he develops from a lovesick teenager wih a "pash" on fellow student Hugo Cartwright to a Cambridge undergraduate involved in international espionage. There are interludes along the way involving, among other things, sex, suicide, Piccadilly rent-boys, and a "lost" pornographic novel by Charles Dickens. This is a clever and entertaining novel that will appeal to Anglophiles with a twisted sense of humor. Recommended for public libraries. - Elizabeth Mellett, Brookline P.L., Mass. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Click Here To See More Details Or Purchase This Item Revenge: A Novel (Paperback) by Stephen Fry The victim of a schoolboy prank that goes bad and ultimately involves the British Intelligence Service, Ned Maddstone finds himself imprisoned in a private lunatic asylum, where he is kept in a drugged state for ten years before he is allowed contact with anyone else. For the next decade, he falls under the tutelage of a man known only as Babe, an elderly spy who teaches him the ways of the world and aids his escape, setting him up with near-limitless funds. The second half of the novel follows Ned as he wreaks his vengeance on all those involved with his mistaken arrest and imprisonment. This bald description does not do justice to the novel's brilliant execution, diminished only by a protagonist who is not very likable and the absence of true conflict as he carries out his revenge. Still, this is a highly intelligent and well-written story by British actor Fry (The Liar, etc.), the author of three previous comic novels and a memoir. Recommended for all public libraries. Ronnie H. Terpening, Univ. of Arizona, Tucson Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Click Here To See More Details Or Purchase This Item Making History (Paperback) by Stephen Fry Michael Young, a Cambridge graduate student who has just completed his dissertation on Adolf Hitler's childhood, and German physicist Leo Zuckermann, inventor of a machine that can look into the past, come up with a way to prevent Hitler from ever having been born. Apparently unfamiliar with the Awful Warnings of the time travel genre, Michael and Leo don't hesitate to change history, and the results of their successful experience certainly make a difference. In this clever, thought-provoking, and very funny novel, Fry ably and convincingly imagines a world that never knew Hitler. This intelligent and gripping tale is even better than Fry's witty The Liar (LJ 4/15/93) and should appeal to a wider audience. Highly recommended. -?Elizabeth Mellett, Brookline P.L., Mass. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Click Here To See More Details Or Purchase This Item QI: Advanced Banter (Hardcover) by Stephen Fry (Author), John Lloyd (Author), John Mitchinson (Author) Have you ever wondered why most books of quotations are stuffed full of rather pedestrian quotes by people you've never heard of? It's a shame because a really good quotation book, one which gathered the truest and funniest insights of the best minds, and organised them into 250 subjects, from ambition to worry, (or from artichokes to woodpeckers), a book which offered you a useful take on almost every situation life throws at you (from the death of your child's hamster to the unified theory of everything), a sourcebook of wise one-loners, of knock-out jokes, of drole asides and heartfelt statements of truth and beauty, a practical handbook of interestingness , well, that would be worth having. And, guess what? Those thoughtful gentlemen at QI have come up with one. Five years of learning how to avoid the dull stuff have left the QI team in a uniquely good position to deliver this elusive holy grail: the big, useful, funny and really very good book of quotations.

Click Here To See More Details Or Purchase This Item The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within (Hardcover) by Stephen Fry The author, a noted novelist, comedian, and actor, doubts his new book will make it onto school curricula, and that's a shame. Of all the poetry guides you're likely to read (and there are a ton of them out there), this one's probably the most entertainingly written and downright useful. The book is full of technical terms--spondee, enjambment, trochee--but these are explained so cleverly and so clearly that we very quickly can use them as though we've been doing so all our lives. The book is an education not only in the mechanics of poetry but also in its history. And, naturally, it's full to bursting with the author's delightfully impish wit: "The above," he writes at one point, "is precisely the kind of worthless arse-dribble I am forced to read whenever I agree to judge a poetry competition." Fry's legion of fans will get an enormous kick out of it, and English-lit students will learn more from this one book than they will from a stack of more traditional textbooks. David Pitt Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Click Here To See More Details Or Purchase This Item Tish and Pish: A delicious collection of sumptious gorgiosities: How to be of a Speakingness Like Stephen Fry (Hardcover) by Stewart Ferris The English tongue has never tasted more delicious than in the mouth of Stephen Fry: his chokingly brilliant sesquipedalian prose is like a shaft of sunlight through the drizzle of quotidian language. Now, with this bound monograph, we can all emit a similarly exquisite effulgence and enjoy the bright shaft of Stephen Fry locution in the privacy of our own smallest pavilion. May his shaft continue to pleasure us for many years to come. After all, what could be fluffier?

Click Here To See More Details Or Purchase This Item Paperwight (Perfect Paperback) by Stephen Fry A collection of the many articles that Stephen Fry has written for magazines, newspapers and radio. The volume includes selected wireless essays of Donald Trefusis, the ageing professor of philology brought to life in Fry's novel "The Liar" and the best of Fry's weekly column for the "Telegraph".

Click Here To See More Details Or Purchase This Item QI: The Book of Animal Ignorance [IMPORT] (Hardcover) by John Lloyd (Author), John Mitchinson (Author), Stephen Fry (Foreword) Join the QI team for an off-road safari through a hundred of the most interesting members of the animal kingdom, armed with illuminating illustrations and diagrams by award-winning artist Ted Dewan. Meet the water bears that can live in suspension for hundreds of years, the parasite carried by your cat that makes men grumpy and women promiscuous, and the woodlouse that drinks through its bottom. Marvel at elephants that walk on tiptoe, pigs that shine in the dark, and woodpeckers that have ears on the end of their tongues. If you still think a pangolin is a musical instrument, that hyenas are dogs, or that sheep are pointless and stupid, "The Book of Animal Ignorance" has arrived just in time.