Stephen Fry is an award-winning comedian, actor, presenter, and director. He rose to fame alongside Hugh Laurie in A Bit of Fry and Laurie (which he co-wrote with Laurie) and Jeeves and Wooster, and he was unforgettable as General Melchett in Blackadder. He hosted more than 180 episodes of QI and has narrated all seven of the Harry Potter novels for the audiobook recordings. He is the bestselling author of the Mythos series, which includes the most recent Mythos: The Illustrated Edition (Chronicle Books), where he draws out the humor and pathos in each story and reveals its deep resonance with our own lives. He also wrote four novels and three volumes of autobiography.
Handsell readers your book:
Mythos: The Illustrated Edition with beautiful artwork from Jésus Sotés is an almost lickably lovely edition of my first book in the Mythos series. Hope you love it.
On your nightstand now:
Someone recommended Simon Mason, so I picked up A Killing in November, a crime novel set in Oxford. Astonishingly good writing. Brilliant, not "cosy."
Favorite book when you were a child:
Favourite Greek Myths by Lilian Stoughton Hyde. She started my love affair with it all.
Your top five authors:
Really? Crumbs.
Charles Dickens
Oscar Wilde
James Joyce
Anton Chekhov
P.G. Wodehouse
Book you've faked reading:
Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence, the U.S.A. trilogy by John Dos Passos, Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe, The Ambassadors by Henry James.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Thomas Mann's Little Herr Friedermann and Other Stories in Penguin Modern Classics with its George Grosz portrait on the front. What a cover!
Book you hid from your parents:
Querelle of Brest by Jean Genet. The cover, Panther Books if I recall aright, was a little too...
Book that changed your life:
Escape from the Shadows by Robin Maugham. A story of growing up gay that so mirrored my own experience.
Favorite line from a book:
"He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad," from the epigraph to Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini.
Five books you'll never part with:
The Complete Works of Shakespeare (obv.), the Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, The Jeeves Omnibus by P.G. Wodehouse, Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh, The Oxford Book of English Verse edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Bleak House by Charles Dickens.
Your favorite Greek god:
I sometimes reply Athena, because she is wise and strong and powerful. I do admire her enormously, but in the end it has to be Hermes: god of liars, story-tellers, thieves, rascals, and travelers. He was charming, but impertinent and cheerful. These are all aspects and qualities that mean a lot to me.