Fool: A Novel [Paperback]

“Hilarious, always inventive, this is a book for all, especially uptight English teachers, bardolaters, and ministerial students.”
—Dallas Morning News

Fool—the bawdy and outrageousNew York Timesbestseller from the unstoppable Christopher Moore—is a hilarious dark comedy retelling of William Shakespeare’sKing Lear…as seen through the eyes of the foolish liege’s clownish court jester, Pocket. A rousing tale of “gratuitous shagging, murder, spanking, maiming, treason, and heretofore unexplored heights of vulgarity and profanity,”Fooljoins Moore’s ownLamb,Fluke,The Stupidest Angel, andYou Suck!as modern masterworks of satiric wit and sublimely twisted genius, prompting Carl Hiassen to declare Christopher Moore “a very sick man, in the very best sense of the word.”

Verily speaks Christopher Moore, much-beloved scrivener and peerless literary jester, who hath writteneth much that is of grand wit and belly-busting mirth, including such laureled bestsellers of theTimes of Olde Newe Yorke as Lamb,A Dirty Job, andYou Suck: A Love Story. Now he takes on no less than the legendary Bard himself (with the utmost humility and respect) in a twisted and insanely funny tale of a moronic monarch and his deceitful daughters—a rousing story of plots, subplots, counterplots, betrayals, war, revenge, bared bosoms, unbridled lust . . . and a ghost (there's always a bloody ghost), as seen through the eyes of a man wearing a codpiece and bells on his head.

“In Fool (2009), the first of Moore’s trilogy, Pocket narrates what really happened between Lear, his three daughters, the treacherous Edmund, the loyal Kent, and other characters — revealing how Shakespeare’s tragedy was more bawdy and wickedly comic than you remember. Yet amidst tlcÕ