Mr. Fforde received 76 rejection letters before finally seeing his first novel, The Eyre Affair, in print. The Eyre Affair is now considered a classic of the modern fantasy genre. Commenting on publishing humorously, Fforde said:
If the real world were a book, it would never find a publisher.”
On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.
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