by Jeffrey Ford
—Chicago Sun-Times
“The Shadow Year captures the totality of a lived period, its actualities and its dreams, its mundane essentials and its odd subjective imperatives; it is a work of episodic beauty and mercurial significance.”
—Nick Gevers, Locus
“Surreal, unsettling, and more than a little weird. Ford has a rare gift for evoking mood with just a few well-chosen words and for creating living, breathing characters with only a few lines of dialogue.”
—Booklist
“Spooky and hypnotic. . . . Recommended for all public libraries.”
—Library Journal
“Put Jeffrey Ford’s latest novel, a Long Island bildungsroman replete with marvels and monsters, on the shelf with Harper Lee, Lynda Barry, Ray Bradbury, Tobias Wolff. The Shadow Year is the kind of magic trick writers dream of being able to pull off—Ford evokes the mysteries, the inhabitants, the landscape of childhood briskly, unsentimentally, and with such power that you come away feeling as if someone has opened up a door to another world.”
—Kelly Link, author of Stranger Things Happen and Magic for Beginners
“Properly creepy, but from time to time deliciously funny and heart-breakingly poignant, too. For those of you—and you know who you are—who think the indispensable element for good genre fiction is good writing, this is not to be missed.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Ford travels deep into the wild country that is childhood in this novel . . . the observations and adventures of these sharp, wayward children provide more than enough depth to be satisfying.”
—New York Times
“Children are the original magic realists. The effects that novelists of a postmodern bent must strive for come naturally to the young, a truth given inventive realization in this wonderful quasi-mystery tale by Jeffrey Ford.”
—Boston Globe
“[T]he setup is perfect for the bleached-out nostalgia [Ford] does best: suburban malaise hiding unspeakable darkness. . . . Setting has always played a central role in Ford’s work, and he clearly knows this yellowed glimpse of Long Island very well—the streets, the trees, the frozen lakes all bear the imprimatur of reality. That’s what keeps you turning pages.”
—Los Angeles Times
Praise for THE DROWNED LIFE
“The Drowned Life raises a banner to salute the power of the imagination. . . . As wildly different as these stories are, they show us one thing: The imagination should be nurtured, allowed to run into its darkest corners and up to its brightest peaks. Or maybe, it just needs to stretch for a spell, under a tree in the backyard.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Unusual and provocative . . . sometimes shocking, sometimes mesmerizing, sometimes humorous, this collection will please fans of Raymond Carver and Flannery O’Connor. Recommended.”
—School Library Journal
“A collection of surreal, melancholy stories dealing with everything from worlds of the drifting dead to drunken tree parties. Ford is the author of the superlative, creepy Well-Built City trilogy and his writing is both powerful and disturbing in the best possible way.”
—Gawker
“The 16 stories in this collection are a perfect introduction to Ford’s work and illustrate the vast range of his imagination. . . . If you haven’t discovered Ford, it’s time you did. His carefully crafted novels and short stories are all top-notch. Grade: A.”
—Rocky Mountain News
Also by Jeffrey Ford
The Shadow Year
The Girl in the Glass
The Cosmology of the Wider World
The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque
The Beyond
The Memoranda
The Physiognomy
Vanitas
Story Collections
The Drowned Life
The Empire of Ice Cream
The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant
Credits
Cover design by Adam Johnson
Cover artwork by Derek Ford
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The “Permissions” section constitutes an extension of this copyright page.
CRACKPOT PALACE. Copyright © 2012 by Jeffrey Ford. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-212259-9
Epub Edition © AUGUST 2012 ISBN: 9780062122674
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