Jeffrey Ford

Author Information
Jeffrey Ford's Latest Book

Newest Release

  • Bibliography:
    27 Books (1 Series)
  • First Book:
    February 1988
  • Latest Book:
    May 2023
  • Author Rating:
  • Share:

Full Series List in Order

The Well-Built City Trilogy

1 - The Physiognomy (Sep-1997)
2 - Memoranda (Oct-1999)
3 - The Beyond (Jan-2001)

Book List in Order: 27 titles

  • Vanitas

  • The Physiognomy

    The Well-Built City Trilogy - 1

    The world of the Well-Built City thrives on the study of the body shape to predict the outcome of a person's personality, deepest secrets, and future, and Physiognomist First Class Cley--a man who shapes generations--is plunged into a horrific world ...

  • Memoranda

    The Well-Built City Trilogy - 2

    The acclaimed author of the World Fantasy Award-winning New York Times Notable novel, The Physiognomy, returns us now to a shadow purgatory of strange dreams and striking moral ambiguities.

    Once Cley held a position of respect and fear in Master Dr...

  • The Beyond

    The Well-Built City Trilogy - 3

    Jeffrey Ford's World Fantasy Award-winner The Physiognomy introduce Cley, master of a twisted and terming science in a nightmare city. In the brilliantly audacious Memoranda , the reformed physiognomist embarked on a surreal quest through the mind of...

  • The Green Word

    in Year's Best Fantasy 3

    The door to fantastic worlds, skewed realities, and breathtaking other realms is opened wide to you once more in this third anthology of the finest short fantasy fiction to emerge over the past year, compiled by acclaimed editor David G. Hartwell....

  • The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque

    A mysterious and richly evocative novel, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque tells the story of portraitist Piero Piambo, who is offered a commission unlike any other. The client is Mrs. Charbuque, a wealthy and elusive woman who asks Piambo to paint her ...

  • The Empire of Ice Cream: Stories

    Starting with the Nebula-winning title story, this “outstanding” fantasy collection by the author of Ahab’s Return will have you “entranced and delighted” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Few writers can extract as much enchantment from...

  • The Girl in the Glass

    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 maste...

  • The Shadow Year

    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 p...



  • The Drowned Life

    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...

  • The Fantasy Writer's Assistant: and Other Stories

    The World Fantasy Award"winning collection from the architect of the Well-Built City Trilogy No matter how far into the realms of space and fantasy Jeffrey Ford’s stories may venture, they have one trait in common: They’re grounded in the unive...

  • Daddy Longlegs of the Evening

    in Naked City

    Featuring original stories from 20 authors, this dark, captivating, fabulous and fantastical collection, Naked City, is not to be missed! Edited by award-winning editor Ellen Datlow.In this thrilling collection of original stories some of today's hot...

  • Crackpot Palace

    From the unparalleled imagination of award-winning author Jeffrey Ford come twenty short stories (one, "The Wish Head," written expressly for this collection) that boldly redefine the world. Crackpot Palace is a sumptuous feast of the unexpected -- a...

  • A Terror

    "A Terror" is a dark fantasy/horror novelette about a strange encounter Miss Emily Dickinson has one early September morning, and the consequences for her and others....

  • Rocket Ship to Hell

    The story of a secret, privately funded, late 60's space mission as told by the science fiction writer who was aboard....

  • The Thyme Fiend

    The Thyme Fiend by Jeffrey Ford is a dark fantasy novelette about a young man who can only prevent seeing visions by eating or smoking thyme. When he finds the skeleton of a missing man the skeleton begins to haunt him. What does it want?"Surely 'The...

  • The Cosmology of the Wider World

    A modern fable based on the labyrinths created by us all Belius has led a peaceful if not uneventful existence until now, as far as minotaurs’ lives go. He mostly keeps to his house, avoiding anyone outside of his family. Despite his human parents...

  • A Natural History of Hell

  • A Natural History of Hell: Stories

    Praise for Jeffrey Ford:"Outstanding. . . . Ford uses . . . incongruously lyrical phrases to infuse the everyday with a nebulous magic." -- Publishers Weekly, Best Books of the Year(Starred Review)"For lovers of the weird and fantastic and lovers of ...



  • The Twilight Pariah

    Three friends go looking for treasure and find horror in Jeffrey Ford's THE TWILIGHT PARIAH. All Maggie, Russell, and Henry wanted out of their last college vacation was to get drunk and play archaeologist in an old house in the woods outside of ...

  • Ahab's Return

    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 autho...

  • Exploring Dark Short Fiction #4

    Author of the fantastic and the bizarre, Jeffrey Ford’s work has won awards and acclaim across the globe for his stories of humor, horror, and unconventional beauty. “Powerful and disturbing in the best possible way” (Gawker) and “Intensely e...

  • Out of Body

    Out of Body is a dark fantasy thriller from multi-award-winning author Jeffrey Ford.A small-town librarian witnesses a murder at his local deli, and what had been routine sleep paralysis begins to transform into something far more disturbing. The tra...

  • The Best of Jeffrey Ford

    • / Science Fiction / Fantasy
    • Buy Buy

    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-biog...

  • Big Dark Hole: Stories

    Jeffrey Ford''s stories often start out as seemingly everyday realist and then the weird comes crashing in, maybe a tiny small unexpected light in a dark house, maybe a hole that a kid finds they have to explore. Big Dark Hole is about the big dark h...

  • Pretty Good Neighbor

    There are worse things than a local gangster’s cronies lurking in New Jersey’s wetlands...At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied....

  • The Bookcase Expedition

    • / Science Fiction / Fantasy
    • Buy Buy

Award-Winning Books by Jeffrey Ford

The Drowned Life
2009 World Fantasy Award -- Collection
The Empire of Ice Cream: Stories
2004 Nebula Award -- Novelette
The Girl in the Glass
2006 Edgar Allan Poe Award -- Paperback Original
The Physiognomy
1998 World Fantasy Award -- Novel
The Shadow Year
2009 World Fantasy Award -- Novel


Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Jeffrey Ford has published 27 books.

Jeffrey Ford does not have a new book coming out soon. The latest book, Pretty Good Neighbor, was published in May 2023.

The first book by Jeffrey Ford, Vanitas, was published in February 1988.

Yes. Jeffrey Ford has 1 series.
Author Series
Top Authors in Fantasy
No ads, please...

$20 / year

FictionDB Premium Membership

Subscribe