The Best of Jeffrey Ford

Dust jacket and interior illustrations by Derek Ford.

These are Jeffrey Ford’s personal selections spanning the decades of his career and representing his many styles — genre hybrids, literary approaches to SF/F/H tropes, forays into the New Weird as one of its early practitioners, realist-auto-biographical/fantastic/ horror mash-ups, and straight-on fantasy stories. Ford is at home across the map of speculative fiction but is tied to, and claims allegiance to, no country.

If you are looking for a collection in which every story is a window on a new world, this book is for you. Within these pages, you’ll visit with the mythic jinmenkins of Japan (dogs with human heads), the great poet of Amherst, Emily Dickinson, the Beautiful Gelreesh, a monster of sympathy, a young man who suffers from a rare form of synaesthesia, Stoodtladdle, the enormous flea mayor of Exo-skeleton town, and Charon, the boatman of Hell. You will travel to strange locales — a bottled city, under the bottom of the lake, the Hotel Lacrimose, and the Idiot Planet. In the words of Joyce Carol Oates: ‘Jeffrey Ford is a beautifully disorienting writer, a poet in an unclassifiable genre — his own.’

This volume includes an entirely new tale (“Mr. Sacrobatus”), an eloquent note on each story, and brilliant header sketches by Derek Ford, the noted fantastic artist and son of Jeffrey Ford.

Contents:

• The Blameless
• Word Doll
• Daltharee
• Creation
• Daddy Long Legs of the Evening
• 86 Deathdick Road
• The Beautiful Gelreesh
• Under the Bottom of the Lake
• The Honeyed Knot
• Exo-Skeleton Town
• The Angel Seems
• The Night Whiskey
• The Seventh Expression of the Robot General
• Blood Drive
• The Dismantled Invention of Fate
• Bright Morning
• At Reparata
• The Dreaming Wind
• The Boatman’s Holiday
• A Man of Light
• A Terror
• Mount Chary Galore
• The Empire of Ice Cream
• A Natural History of Autumn
• Relic
• The Annals of Eelin-Ok
• Mr. Sacrobatus