The Drowned Life
By Jeffrey Ford
4.5/5
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this ebook
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.
Jeffrey Ford
Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, the Edgar Award–winning The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, The Shadow Year, and The Twilight Pariah, and his collections include The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, Crackpot Palace, and A Natural History of Hell. He lives near Columbus, Ohio, and teaches writing at Ohio Wesleyan University.
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Reviews for The Drowned Life
46 ratings5 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I read and loved The Well-built City trilogy on my early explorations of New Weird. This collection of short stories is my first meeting with Jeffrey Ford’s writing outside the world of Cley the physiognomist, and I was not disappointed. This book has everything I love about literature: gently or blatantly tilted reality, enigmas, eeire ambience, mind-boggling weirdness and endings that kind of makes sense without really answering anything. Many goose-bump incidents here. Most of these stories are very good, a few are excellent. None are bad. Among my favorites are the one about the annual death berry fest, where a few chosen people in a small town get the chance to talk to their dead relatives, the surreal dreamlike kaleidoscope about the astronaut and his alien lover, and the merely page long snap shot of the mother and her severely disabled daughter in the writing class. Highly recommended if your enjoy the short stories of Kelly Link, Margo Lanagan or China Miéville. But Ford is one of a kind. I put down the book knowing I need to read everything by this author. Eve-ry-thing.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Channeling the gravitas of Borges and Calvino, Jeffrey Ford's collection of short stories titled The Drowned Life, though at times overreaching in scope, sublimely conjures a sense of sheer wonder and befuddlement when confronted with the intersection of everyday life and the dreams that shape it, or are shaped by it.Ford alternates his stories between the subtle and grandiose, the mundane and the outlandish, incorporating through each a pervasive sense of mystery and weirdness. When he is not detailing the wisdom of a soothsaying octopus, a town’s dependence upon an annual, magical breeze, and the peculiar behavior surrounding the annual “deathberry” drinkers, he describes the power contained within an overlooked scribble, an apartment's potentially haunting flicker of light, losing a Chinese curse in a poker game, and the dictated writings of a comatose daughter through her mother.This see-saw between the highly fantastical and the merely strange begs careful attention and even patience of the reader, noting the eternal truth that things are never what they seem. Several stories, especially that which introduces the fascinating Madame Mutandis, are deserving of their own novels. The Drowned Life is a deep and resonating read.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5These short stories are all over the place...there is no single thread to tie them together, other than a kind of dark morbidity that underlies them all. The stories range from spooky mood pieces about a couple in a haunted house, to straight sci-fi about aliens and their dreams, to tortured metaphors, as in the title story about "Drowned Town" where people live when they 'go under.' I thought some of the stories ended abruptly, with too many ends left untied, but the ideas are so incredible that they linger in your mind. I especially enjoyed a story about a dream wind that comes once a year and causes chaos in a small town, and another about an extremely rare berry that produces a strange liqueur with odd side affects.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I've been reading Ford's short stories in a few places over the last year or two, and have enjoyed every single one. So I was very glad to snag an ARC from the author.There is a range of stories: allegorical and highly imaginative, as in "The Drowned Life", where a man literally goes under(water) from the stresses of life; some that tell a story that feels very real-world but has fantasy seeping in through the sides to lesser or greater degrees, as in "The Night Whiskey", where a drink made from berries harvested from a plant that grows from some dead animals leads to disturbing occurrences, or "The Golden Dragon"; the flat-out bizarre and wonderful "The Way He Does It", about a man's unstated knack; surreal and beautiful, as in "The Dreaming Wind", where a playful wind blows through a town and temporarily turns people into animals and other fun hijinks, until one year it stops blowing; the curious, as in "The Scribble Mind", where some people can remember what it was like in the womb and are thus able to draw a certain scribble; and more. This range keeps the collection lively. You never quite know what to expect from the next story.Not every story thralled me, but I expect that from any collection of stories. This one's success rate was very high; there were none that I disliked, only some that I found less strong. I recommend The Drowning Life, especially if you've read some of Ford's stories and think you'd like to read some more.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Jeffrey Ford has long been one of my favorite short fiction writers, and this new collection confirms my opinion that he excels at the short form. I confess that I am not the fan of the title story that many are, but I very much enjoy “The Night Whiskey,” “The Dreaming Wind,” and “The Scribble Mind,” which I’d read before, and was delighted to come across new stories I’d previously missed. Most intriguing to me, though, were short pieces scattered throughout the book that might – it’s not clear, and one should never draw any conclusions about a fiction writer – but pieces that just might be autobiographical, and if not, are certainly linked pieces about an extended family. These include “A Few Things About Ants,” which really is nothing more, but nothing less, than the title suggests; “Present from the Past,” about the narrator’s mother, her spurt of creativity after she ceases drinking, her death, and its aftermath; and “The Fat One,” about how the narrator quits smoking. If these are portions of a memoir, I definitely want to read that book. If they are fiction, they are wonderful fiction, and I hope they become a novel. Whatever they are, combined with the three stories I mentioned, they are worth the price of the book in and of themselves.