Terry Pratchett has long been the worldwide bestselling author of the unique and laugh-out-loud Discworld fantasies, and in 2009 he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth for his services to literature. But few listeners may know that he started out as a newspaperman. Michael Fenton Stevens narrates this expansive collection of Pratchett’s essays, opinion pieces, and speeches with a journalist’s ear for getting the facts just so and keeping the remarks wry and pithy. Fenton is especially adept at reflecting Pratchett’s righteous indignation and gallows humor, which are aimed squarely at his battle with early onset Alzheimer’s disease and his fight for more research and understanding about the disease. As Neil Gaiman points out in his foreword, which he narrates himself,“Seriousness is not the opposite of humor.” For Pratchett, humor is found in the details and in the fury of hard work. B.P. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

Praise for Terry Pratchett

“One of the world’s most delightful writers.”
    —Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing
 
“Some writers simply possess the Gift. No matter what they bring out . . . it’s sure to be compulsively readable. That’s certainly the case with Terry Pratchett.”
    —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World
 
“The great Terry Pratchett, whose wit is metaphysical, who creates an energetic and lively secondary world, who has a multifarious genius for strong parody . . . who deals with death with startling originality. He writes amazing sentences.”
    —A. S. Byatt, The New York Times
 
“Clever . . . insightful. . . . [Pratchett’s] wry wit is as good as gold.”
    —Lylah M. Alphonse, The Boston Globe
 
“One of the most consistently funny writers around; a master of the stealth simile, the time-delay pun, and the deflationary three-part list.”
    —Ben Aaronovitch, The Guardian (London)

“What Pratchett does is not just great, but unparalleled. In five hundred years, it won’t be the Nobel laureates who are being studied. It’s going to be this guy.”
    —Brandon Sanderson, Tor.com

Terry Pratchett has long been the worldwide bestselling author of the unique and laugh-out-loud Discworld fantasies, and in 2009 he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth for his services to literature. But few listeners may know that he started out as a newspaperman. Michael Fenton Stevens narrates this expansive collection of Pratchett’s essays, opinion pieces, and speeches with a journalist’s ear for getting the facts just so and keeping the remarks wry and pithy. Fenton is especially adept at reflecting Pratchett’s righteous indignation and gallows humor, which are aimed squarely at his battle with early onset Alzheimer’s disease and his fight for more research and understanding about the disease. As Neil Gaiman points out in his foreword, which he narrates himself,“Seriousness is not the opposite of humor.” For Pratchett, humor is found in the details and in the fury of hard work. B.P. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

★ 2014-08-11
The celebrated creator of the Discworld series of fantasy novels offers an eclectic collection of pieces and speeches from as early as the 1970s.Pratchett (The Long Mars, 2014, etc.), who has Alzheimer's disease, writes often about his enemy-illness in this thematic collection. The author "went public" with his illness at the time of his diagnosis and has proved a worthy adversary of the illness and advocate for increased medical research. Throughout this inimitable collection, a number of traits and themes emerge. His biting—often self-deprecating—wit is evident on nearly every page, as is his wonder at being the literary celebrity that he is. He most assuredly realizes and is profoundly grateful for his stellar fortune, and he defends his genre both with humor and with passion (he believes that most fiction is fantasy) and repeatedly credits his predecessors and literary mentors, especially Tolkien, whose Lord of the Rings, he tells us, he used to reread every summer. Pratchett writes about his own religious beliefs—or, rather, lack of them. "I don't think I've found God," he wrote in 2008, "but I may have seen where gods come from." He also rails against aspects of society he finds repellant; number crunchers and warmongers come in for some special disdain. The author has keen thoughts about education, as well, arguing that we should first erect a library and then build a school around it, and he blasts those who ignore the health of the environment. There is some repetition—not unexpected in a collection ranging over several decades. He writes continually about his affection for The Wind in the Willows, a book that captured and changed him in boyhood. He offers some advice for would-be fantasy writers ("You need to know how your world works") and reminds us that at the heart of the genre is hope. Pratchett's close friend and fellow literary celebrity Neil Gaiman provides the foreword. Lit throughout by the bright star of wonder.