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In the Well-Built City, Master Drachton Below's power is absolute, and he will not hesitate to use it. His primary method of control is through his physiognomists, who are trained to read a person's face and body, perceiving that person's past and secrets-and even events yet to come. These seers are the judges and jury. Now Drachton has found something that could extend his reign for eternity: a fruit that bestows immortality. To investigate its whereabouts, Below sends cold, collected physiognomist Cley to the remote mining town of Anamasobia. One at a time Cley interrogates the townspeople, performing his usual fact finding without issue. That is, until he meets the beautiful and bright Arla, who harbors a secret that could potentially turn Cley's world upside down-and topple the Well-Built City itself. A Kafkaesque journey into the unknown, The Physiognomy is an award-winning trip through a land where the line between reality and imagination is constantly blurred.
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.
Talk is powerful. Engaging in the right conversation at the right time is key to both personal and organizational success. And it isn’t just ‘difficult’ conversations that matter. The Four Conversations clearly demonstrates it is the everyday dialogue we have with one another that is critical. Armed with a solid body of research and their own first-hand observations, Jeffrey and Laurie Ford identify four types of conversations that every one of us must use to get things done: initiative conversations to introduce something new; understanding conversations to help people relate to new ideas or processes; performance conversations to request specific actions and results; and closure conv...
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.
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 friend...
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.
“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 grie...
A book of fantastic stories about the hell on earth that is living.
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.
After beholding the destruction of the Well-Built City, physiognomist Cley is now a simple healer seeking peace and atonement in the happy village of survivors. When the town falls into a deadly sleeping sickness, Cley must make a dangerous trip to the ruins of City - now beset by mechanical birds and werewolves - to seek out an antidote. The evil Master Below is still alive, but an accidental exposure to the sickness that he created has put him into a coma. With the help of Below's adopted demon son, found in the wreckage of the laboratory, Cley ventures into the mind and intricate memories of Below to search for a cure. Cley will encounter wonders and dangers undreamed of in the second installment of this classic trilogy.