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Big Dark Hole: and Other Stories Kindle Edition
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World Fantasy Award finalist
It sounds innocuous. The routine world ofcollege 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.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherSmall Beer Press
- Publication dateJuly 6, 2021
- File size1290 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
Praise for A Natural History of Hell:
“This is the perfect reader-who-has-everything gift for fantasy fans with a literary bent or vice versa. Ford brilliantly cross-pollinates the grim suburban settings of literary fiction with fantastical elements, adding dashes of humor and empathy to provide some light in dark days.”― Publishers Weekly: Holiday Gift Guide
“Ford specializes in employing vivid and precise language to portray the inexplicable, often with great intensity or deadpan humor. In his odd but compelling stories, strange things happen for reasons that are never made completely clear but that demand attention even as they grow ever more disturbing. A Natural History of Hell is an excellent sampler of Ford’s singular brand of storytelling, a baker’s dozen of diverse and diverting literary treats.”― Michael Berry, San Francisco Chronicle
“Formally Ford’s stories are object lessons in how to stage a narrative.”― James Sallis, F&SF
“In this collection of 13 stories, Ford showcases his award-winning talent for crafting creepy tales that bend the world as we know it in unexpected ways. Although the stories are not linked, they do share a common theme: wickedness lurking just beneath the surface of everyday life. And while each uses different degrees of the supernatural to get there, all employ a dark and uneasy atmosphere, quirky characters, and thought-provoking endings, with delightfully unsettling results. . . . This collection is a good choice for fans of short stories by Neil Gaiman, China Miéville, or Kevin Brockmeier.”― Booklist Online (starred review)
“Seamlessly blends subtle psychological horror with a mix of literary history, folklore, and SF in this collection of 13 short stories, all focused on the struggles, sorrows, and terrors of daily life.”― Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“‘The Blameless’ is . . . a perfect example of Ford’s eerie subversion of mundane life. In it, suburban parents have begun throwing their children exorcisms as rites of passage, and the premise delivers plenty of black humor and bone-dry social satire.”― Jason Heller, NPR
“A series of hits that linger long after you’ve finished reading. The mundane seems fantastical when penned by Ford, and the fantastical dreadfully human. Stories range from surreal daily life, to epic fantasy, to Gothic Americana and far, far beyond. It’s hard to pick a favorite, so I recommend you read them all.”― RT Book Reviews ****
“An excellent collection of stories.”― Weird Fiction Review
“A truly outstanding writer.”― Locus
“Jeffrey Ford is a beautifully disorienting writer, a poet in an unclassifiable genre―his own.”―Joyce Carol Oates
“Jeffrey Ford is a true heir to his teacher, John Gardner―not only in his ability to inhabit an astonishing range of styles and different worlds with jaw-dropping verisimilitude, but also in the great-hearted compassion and depth that he brings to his characters. I have long admired and learned from his work, and I’m grateful to have these beautiful stories to contemplate.”―Dan Chaon
--This text refers to the paperback edition.About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : B08CBJ55BD
- Publisher : Small Beer Press (July 6, 2021)
- Publication date : July 6, 2021
- Language : English
- File size : 1290 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 212 pages
- Lending : Not Enabled
- Best Sellers Rank: #860,497 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #2,068 in Science Fiction Anthologies (Kindle Store)
- #2,448 in Fantasy Anthologies & Short Stories (Kindle Store)
- #2,843 in Fantasy Anthologies
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels, Vanitas, The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, and The Shadow Year, The Twilight Pariah, Ahab's Return, Or The Last Voyage, and Out of Body. His story collections are The Fantasy Writer's Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, Crackpot Palace, A Natural History of Hell, and The Best of Jeffrey Ford from PS, Big Dark Hole, 2021, from Small Beer Press. Ford has published well over 100 short stories, which have appeared in numerous journals, magazines and anthologies, from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction to The Oxford Book of American Short Stories. He is the recipient of the World Fantasy Award, Nebula, Shirley Jackson Award, Edgar Allan Poe Award, Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire (France), Hayakawa Award (Japan). His fiction has been translated into about 20 languages. In addition to writing, he’s been a professor of literature and writing for 30 years and has been a guest lecturer at Clarion Writing Workshop, The Stone Coast MFA Program, The Richard Hugo House in Seattle, and the Antioch University Writing Workshop. He lives in Ohio and currently teaches part time at Ohio Wesleyan University.
Link to Ford's homepage -- http://www.well-builtcity.com/
Customer reviews
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It’s Jeffrey Ford, people. You know you’ll get your moneys worth.
As always, Ford infuses gripping imagery with near unparalleled atmospheric skill.
Highly recommended.
-Colt Leasure, writer