Know of anything similar to Jasper Fforde?

I have completely enjoyed all the clever wordplay in Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series and have just started The Big Over Easy...since his work sort of defies description (humor? mystery? sci-fi? fantasy? comedy?) it's a little hard to determine a category to search in to find similar authors. Any ideas?

As far as I know, there is no one like Jasper Fforde. He is unique.

I just finished Lost in a good book and I love Fforde. He is very clever and entertaining.

Rats! I saw a book at Borders that was compared to Jasper Fforde, and I can't remember what it was! Terribly sorry...

I've just finished a book called The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry. I'm having a hard time writing a review for it. It's about a detective's clerk who is suddenly promoted to detective to find out what happened to the original detective. Most of the scenes take place in people's dreams. Its really hard to describe! The overall feeling is sort of a noir comic book feel.

As soon as I figure out a better way to explain this, I'll be posting a review. It's really quite good. Not up to Fforde, but close.

If you like Fforde's nursery crimes, you might want to check out Robert Rankin. I didn't love him but many do.

I checked a few titles by Jasper FForde, and an author named Connie Willis comes up for each of them - I'm not familiar with her, but it might be worth giving her books a try.

Tom Holt is pretty enjoyable - better than Robert Rankin, not as great as Terry Pratchett or Jasper Fforde.

#6 Connie Willis can be great fun. I particularly like Bellweather and To Say Nothing of the Dog, as well as the short stories in Fire Watch. She writes some SF, some fantasy, some real-world humor, and so on. Not really much like Fforde, though. I can't think of anyone who is. There were some of those late-sixties fantasies that owed a great debt to modern chemistry, such as The Unicorn Girl, but they don't hold up all that well except as unintentional comedy.

It's not a perfect comparison, but you might like the Christopher Fowler books featuring Bryant and May. It's not an alternate reality thing, but the first book, Full Dark House, is a sort of time travel effect. I really enjoyed it.

i've not read anyone that is quite like Fforde, but there are a few books that i would suggest to someone who likes Fforde. Christopher Moore has a similar weird wittiness about him. check out Lamb, Practical Demonkeeping, and Bloodsucking Fiends. Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Prachett is wonderful. also quirky and strange in a great way.

If you like Fforde, you should read Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently series. It's just two books and both have this quirky supernatural basis. The first, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, opens with a space ship landing in a desert and a robotic knight on horseback appearing from this alternative universe in a bathroom at Cambridge. There's also a ghost, a couch that gets stuck between realities, a love story and, of course, Dirk Gently investigating some mystery. The second book, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul is about the Norse gods wandering around present day London, but few people can see them, (Dirk can) because we don't believe in them anymore. And there's trouble among the gods, because Odin's in a nursing home and doesn't want to leave because he loves the clean sheets, and Thor carries around a huge Coke machine--when the reason comes out at the end, it is just delightfully unexpected.