Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The Drowned Life
    Unavailable
    The Drowned Life
    Unavailable
    The Drowned Life
    Ebook334 pages5 hours

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 6, 2009
    ISBN9780061980381
    Unavailable
    The Drowned Life
    Author

    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.

    Read more from Jeffrey Ford

    Related to The Drowned Life

    Related ebooks

    Short Stories For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Paul Tremblay

      Jun 17, 2020

      IT’S ALWAYS BEEN ONE OF MY BIGGEST FEARS that I would live to see the end of everything,” says Paul Tremblay, speaking to SFX from his Massachusetts home in the middle of lockdown. It’s a singularly peculiar time, and a peculiar interview for him to

      3 min read

    • Article

      Just Trust Me: In Praise Of Strange Books

      Dec 23, 2017

      Author Victoria Schwab says she loves the books that can't be categorized, that fall between library-shelf categories, and that spark passionate debate among readers who either love them or hate them.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Equinox

      May 18, 2022

      In this strange world, where identities change with the rising and setting of the sun, supernatural forces are at work – and they’re causing trouble… St Leonars prison was an appropriately imposing building. It rose out of the surrounding shacks and

      5 min read

    • Article

      'The Raven Tower' Rises From Shakespearean Foundations

      Feb 26, 2019

      Ann Leckie's new fantasy novel is packed with family intrigue, throne-room maneuvering and nods to Hamlet in its story of a son who comes home to find his father missing and his uncle in power.

      2 min read

    • Article

      Nine Haunting Postapocalyptic Novels

      Feb 3, 2022

      The paradox of imagined apocalypses is that they’re always more about the present than the future. Here's a list of a few haunting and evocative titles. The post Nine Haunting Postapocalyptic Novels appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Wild And Wicked Things

      Mar 23, 2022

      RELEASED 31 MARCH 466 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Francesca May Publisher Orbit Books Hopes for a 21st century revival of the roaring twenties seem doomed to be dashed. But if you’re still hopefully waiting, try heading back to the origin

      1 min read

    • Article

      Tender Is The Flesh

      Jan 29, 2020

      RELEASED 6 FEBRUARY 224 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Augustina Bazterrica Publisher Pushkin Press This is a pretty unpleasant book. It’s clearly meant to be, but knowing that doesn’t make it any less unsettling to read. It’s set in a near future wh

      1 min read

    • Article

      Also Out

      Jul 15, 2020

      Words have mystical power in Jay Posey’s space opera EVERY SKY A GRAVE (out now, Harper Voyager). Set in a future where mankind has mastered the Deep Language of the universe, it centres on an adept sent to a world that’s become corrupted. The world

      1 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Sep 1, 2022

      1. Here there’s no rainy season.Sun scalds my forehead,yet the pool is empty. Beside it,a toppled table, its glass surface shattered.The asphalt is too hot for bare feet. 2. Far away: white hillocksand white dunes under a deepblue sky. Swirling winds

      5 min read

    • Article

      We All Live in Uncertain

      Jul 30, 2020

      “Think of Caddo as a maze of lakes within lakes,” says John Winn, proprietor of Caddo Outback Tours, as the two of us settle into a small Go-Devil boat roped to a dock in Uncertain, on the border of northern Louisiana. For two decades, Winn has given

      6 min read

    • Article

      Sleep Nights

      Oct 5, 2021

      Sleep Nights
      18 min read

    • Article

      Following a Thread

      Sep 19, 2019

      Following a Thread
      6 min read

    • Article

      Gringo Honeymoon

      May 17, 2021

      Gringo Honeymoon
      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Drowned Life

    4.5/5

    46 ratings5 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      I 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.
    • 5/5
      Channeling 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.
    • 5/5
      These 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.
    • 5/5
      I'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.
    • 5/5
      Jeffrey 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.