Most Popular Books by Jeffrey Ford

In New York''s Long Island, in the unpredictable decade of the 1960s, a young boy laments the approaching close of summer and the advent of sixth grade. Growing up in a household with an overworked father whom he rarely sees, an alcoholic mother who paints wonderful canvases that are never displayed, an older brother who serves as both tormentor and protector, and a younger sister who inhabits her own secret world, the boy takes his amusements where he can find them. Some of his free time is spent in the basement of the family''s modest home, where he and his brother, Jim, have created Botch Town, a detailed cardboard replica of their community, complete with clay figurines representing friends and neighbors. And so the time passes with a not-always-reassuring sameness—until the night a prowler is reported stalking the neighborhood. Appointing themselves ad hoc investigators, the brothers set out to aid the police—while their little sister, Mary, smokes cigarettes, speaks in other voices, inhabits alternate personas . . . and, unbeknownst to her older siblings, moves around the inanimate residents of Botch Town. But ensuing events add a shadowy cast to the boys'' night games: disappearances, deaths, and spectral sightings capped off by the arrival of a sinister man in a long white car trawling the neighborhood after dark. Strangest of all is the inescapable fact that every one of these troubling occurrences seems to correspond directly to the changes little Mary has made to the miniature town in the basement. Not since Ray Bradbury''s classic Dandelion Wine has a novel so richly evoked the dark magic of small-town boyhood. At once a hypnotically compelling mystery, a masterful re-creation of a unique time and place, a celebration of youth, and a poignant and disquieting portrait of home and family—all balancing on a razor''s edge separating reality from the unsettlingly remarkable—The Shadow Year is a monumental new work from one of contemporary fiction''s most fearless and inventive artists.

The World Fantasy Award–winning collection from the architect of the Well-Built City Trilogy No matter how far into the realms of space and fantasy Jeffrey Ford''s stories may venture, they have one trait in common: They''re grounded in the universal. The Fantasy Writer''s Assistant, Ford''s debut collection, is no exception. "Creation," which received the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story and a nomination for a Nebula Award, relates a boy''s attempts to animate a man made of sticks and pebbles. Even as the creature''s life fades along with the summer, its loneliness and yearning for contact are palpable. Other blends of the worldly and otherworldly are evident in "Bright Morning," in which a man searches far and wide for a cursed Kafka book, and "At Reparata," when the grief of a king over the death of his queen takes the form of a destructive moth that could overtake the entire kingdom. The Fantasy Writer''s Assistant, its titular story another Nebula Award finalist, reveals Jeffrey Ford at his creative best.

The Great Depression has bound a nation in despair -- and only a privileged few have risen above it: the exorbitantly wealthy ... and the hucksters who feed upon them. Diego, a seventeen-year-old illegal Mexican immigrant, owes his salvation to master grifter Thomas Schell. Together with Schell''s gruff and powerful partner, they sail comfortably through hard times, scamming New York''s grieving rich with elaborate, ingeniously staged séances -- until an impossible occurrence changes everything. While "communing with spirits," Schell sees an image of a young girl in a pane of glass, silently entreating the con man for help. Though well aware that his otherworldly "powers" are a sham, Schell inexplicably offers his services to help find the lost child -- drawing Diego along with him into a tangled maze of deadly secrets and terrible experimentation. At once a hypnotically compelling mystery and a stunningly evocative portrait of Depression-era New York, The Girl in the Glass is a masterly literary adventure from a writer of exemplary vision and skill.

After surviving a violent crime, a smalltown librarian begins leaving his body—and discovering dark secrets—in the award-winning author''s fantasy thriller. Owen is a creature of habit. Every morning just after seven a.m., he picks up his coffee and sweet roll at the local deli where he would invariably see young Helen Roan behind the counter. Then one morning changes everything for Owen. That morning, he attempts to save Helen from being murdered . . . and fails. Soon Owen discovers just how much the experience has changed him. What had once been routine sleep paralysis begins to transform into something far more disturbing. The trauma, it seems, is driving him out of his own body. The town he knows so well is suddenly revealed to him from a whole new perspective. Secrets are everywhere and demons fester behind closed doors. Worst of all, Owen discovers a serial killer who has been preying on the area for over a century . . . one capable of traveling with him through his dreams.

World Fantasy Award finalist It sounds innocuous. The routine world of college teaching. Quiet evenings on a porch with your wife. And then . . . maybe it’s an unexpected light in a dark and uninhabited house, maybe it’s a drainage tunnel that some poor kid is suddenly compelled to explore. Maybe there’s a monkey in the woods or an angel that you’ll need to fight if you want to gain tenure. Jeffrey Ford''s stunning new collection Big Dark Hole is about those big, dark holes that we find ourselves once in a while and maybe, too, the big dark holes that exist inside of us.

There are worse things than a local gangster’s cronies lurking in New Jersey’s wetlands... At the Publisher''s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

A book of fantastic stories about the hell on earth that is living.

A mysterious and richly evocative novel, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque tells the story of portraitist Piero Piambo, who is offered a commission unlike any other. The client is Mrs. Charbuque, a wealthy and elusive woman who asks Piambo to paint her portrait, though with one bizarre twist: he may question her at length on any topic, but he may not, under any circumstances, see her. So begins an astonishing journey into Mrs. Charbuque''s world and the world of 1893 New York society in this hypnotically compelling literary thriller.

There is a town that brews a strange intoxicant from a rare fruit called the deathberry—and once a year a handful of citizens are selected to drink it. . . . There is a life lived beneath the water—among rotted buildings and bloated corpses—by those so overburdened by the world''s demands that they simply give up and go under. . . . In this mesmerizing blend of the familiar and the fantastic, multiple award-winning New York Times notable author Jeffrey Ford creates true wonders and infuses the mundane with magic. In tales marked by his distinctive, dark imagery and fluid, exhilarating prose, he conjures up an annual gale that transforms the real into the impossible, invents a strange scribble that secretly unites a significant portion of society, and spins the myriad dreams of a restless astronaut and his alien lover. Bizarre, beautiful, unsettling, and sublime, The Drowned Life showcases the exceptional talents of one of contemporary fiction''s most original artists.

A man is hired to transcribe the words of a mysterious woman who speaks in "spews" during self-induced trances, but he soon discovers an intriguing story coalescing within her seemingly incoherent rambles. At the Publisher''s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Starting with the Nebula-winning title story, this "outstanding" fantasy collection by the author of Ahab''s Return will have you "entranced and delighted" ( Publishers Weekly, starred review). Few writers can extract as much enchantment from the mundane as award-winning author Jeffrey Ford. His talent for storytelling is readily evident in The Empire of Ice Cream, his collection of ordinary and extraordinary juxtapositions. The bittersweet Nebula Award–winning title story introduces a composer with synesthesia who finds the sound—and woman—of his dreams through a cup of coffee. Then there are the fairies that inhabit sandcastles in the fleeting moments before the inevitable rise of the tide. Ford populates this charmed collection with stories taken from his own life as well, including "Botch Town," which finds him as a schoolboy, and "The Trentino Kid," which recalls his experience digging for clams.

“Jeffrey Ford is one of the few writers who uses wonder instead of ink in his pen.” – Jonathan Carroll A bold and intriguing fabulist novel that reimagines two of the most legendary characters in American literature—Captain Ahab and Ishmael of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick—from the critically acclaimed Edgar and World Fantasy award-winning author of The Girl in the Glass and The Shadow Year. At the end of a long journey, Captain Ahab returns to the mainland to confront the true author of the novel Moby-Dick, his former shipmate, Ishmael. For Ahab was not pulled into the ocean’s depths by a harpoon line, and the greatly exaggerated rumors of his untimely death have caused him grievous harm—after hearing about Ahab’s demise, his wife and child left Nantucket for New York, and now Ahab is on a desperate quest to find them. Ahab’s pursuit leads him to The Gorgon’s Mirror, the sensationalist tabloid newspaper that employed Ishmael as a copy editor while he wrote the harrowing story of the ill-fated Pequod. In the penny press’s office, Ahab meets George Harrow, who makes a deal with the captain: the newspaperman will help Ahab navigate the city in exchange for the exclusive story of his salvation from the mouth of the great white whale. But their investigation—like Ahab’s own story—will take unexpected, dangerous, and ultimately tragic turns. Told with wisdom, suspense, a modicum of dry humor and horror, and a vigorous stretching of the truth, Ahab’s Return charts an inventive and intriguing voyage involving one of the most memorable characters in classic literature, and pays homage to one of the greatest novels ever written.

A modern fable based on the labyrinths created by us all Belius has led a peaceful if not uneventful existence until now, as far as minotaurs'' lives go. He mostly keeps to his house, avoiding anyone outside of his family. Despite his human parents'' efforts to shield him from the potential hysteria of the townspeople, Belius hears about something beyond his home''s walls, even beyond the town itself—something called the Wider World. He decides to explore this strange place where the possibilities far outnumber those of the mundane real world. Here, Belius has a chance to be the minotaur he has always wanted to be. He is joined by Vashti the owl and Pezimote the tortoise, creatures that provide the philosophical guidance he will need if he is to complete his physical and metaphysical journey. From World Fantasy Award winner Jeffrey Ford, The Cosmology of the Wider World is about the hopes, dreams, and visions we create for ourselves. This ebook includes an introduction by Jeff VanderMeer.

Descend into horror with witches, vampires, haunted houses, and murderous blood copies. Check out excerpts from four short works that will be going bump in the night in Fall 2017. A Long Day in Lychford by Paul Cornell, The Twilight Pariah by Jeffrey Ford, Switchback by Melissa F. Olson, and The Murders of Molly Southbourne by Tade Thompson. At the Publisher''s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

"Poignant and punchy." — The New York Times Three friends go looking for treasure and find horror in Jeffrey Ford''s The Twilight Pariah. All Maggie, Russell, and Henry wanted out of their last college vacation was to get drunk and play archaeologist in an old house in the woods outside of town. When they excavate the mansion''s outhouse they find way more than they bargained for: a sealed bottle filled with a red liquid, along with the bizarre skeleton of a horned child Disturbing the skeleton throws each of their lives into a living hell. They feel followed wherever they go, their homes are ransacked by unknown intruders, and people they care about are brutally, horribly dismembered. The three friends awakened something, a creature that will stop at nothing to retrieve its child.

“Jeffrey Ford is one of the few writers who uses wonder instead of ink in his pen….A rare and wonderful talent.” —Jonathan Carroll, author of The Wooden Sea Eclectic is certainly an adjective that can be used to describe the work of the phenomenal Jeffrey Ford—along with imaginative, provocative, mesmerizing, and brilliant. His powerful dark fantasy, The Physiognomy, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; his novel, The Girl in the Glass, won the Edgar® Award, mystery and crime fiction’s most prestigious prize. Crackpot Palace is Ford’s fourth superb collection of short fiction, and in it, his prodigious talent shines as brightly as ever. Here are twenty tales both strange and wonderful, filled with mad scientists, vampires, lost souls, and Native American secrets, from an author who has been glowingly compared to Kafka, Dante, and Caleb Carr (The Alienist).

Tor.com Publishing Editorial Spotlight #3 is a curated selection of novellas by editor Ellen Datlow This collection includes: The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle The Twilight Pariah by Jeffrey Ford Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach by Kelly Robson A cosmic horror is rising in Red Hook, and Black Tom must either stop it or help it grow in Victor LaValle’s award-winning The Ballad of Black Tom. Three friends go looking for treasure and find horror in Jeffrey Ford''s The Twilight Pariah. ("Poignant and punchy." —New York Times). Blackfeet author Stephen Graham Jones brings readers a spine-tingling Native American horror novella Mapping the Interior. Experience award-winning author Kelly Robson’s Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky, a far-reaching, mind-bending science fiction adventure that uses time travel to merge climate fiction with historical fantasy. At the Publisher''s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

The story of a secret, privately funded, late 60''s space mission as told by the science fiction writer who was aboard. At the Publisher''s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.