A Slip of the Keyboard by Terry Pratchett

Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. For Bemelmans was 'the man who came to cocktails'. Lit throughout by the bright star of wonder.Īn extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. Pratchett’s close friend and fellow literary celebrity Neil Gaiman provides the foreword. 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. He writes continually about his affection for The Wind in the Willows, a book that captured and changed him in boyhood. There is some repetition-not unexpected in a collection ranging over several decades. 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. “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. Pratchett writes about his own religious beliefs-or, rather, lack of them. 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.

His biting-often self-deprecating-wit is evident on nearly every page, as is his wonder at being the literary celebrity that he is. Throughout this inimitable collection, a number of traits and themes emerge.

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.

Pratchett ( The Long Mars, 2014, etc.), who has Alzheimer’s disease, writes often about his enemy-illness in this thematic collection. The celebrated creator of the Discworld series of fantasy novels offers an eclectic collection of pieces and speeches from as early as the 1970s.

A Slip of the Keyboard by Terry Pratchett