Eerie. That's how I like to describe this collection of short stories. Sometimes funny, sometimes sad, sometimes bizarre, but always eerie. These stories feel like written dreams, with slippery logic and offhand glimpses that you understand *just* enough to find disturbing.

Great Scott, it's magical realism done right! Highly enjoyable short stories, surreal, yet never losing sight of the story as a whole.

Jeffrey Ford is amazing.These short stories are all excellent. The first one I didn't like because it made me uncomfortable which just show how good he is that in so few pages he had me squirming. I now want to run out and go get all of his books because I was so impressed by this book.

great short stories - night whiskey which explores the deathberry and the perilous art of harvesting drunks from trees is amazing and the story about the story at the bottom of the lake is ingeniously told in the style of a seance with the author suddenly seeing things and then having things vanish and then suddenly seeing new thingsthe rest are various forms of oddity that would make for bizarre but beautiful moviesi highly recommend it

Dark, imaginative, Bradbury-esque collection of short stories.

If you could drink a shot of whiskey and be transported to a world where you get to visit with a departed relative or friend, would you do it? I would in a minute and so would many of the people in this small town. Once a year, there is a lottery system to choose who gets to participate. Someone has to go find these participants in the morning (they have a tendency to climb trees while under the influence) and this year one of these men is a newbie. And of course, this is the year that something...

Solid 3its not bad by any means, the book is interestingly written, but at the same time I don't think the book was for me. More often than not, I was confused and didn't really understand the deeper metaphors of certain stories.

Some time back my brother-in-law David and I read the same book at the same time. We chose "The Drowned Life", a short story collection by Jeffrey Ford. And for the first time when doing this, we were both reading the same things at about the same time.Many of the stories had been published elsewhere, but here is a rundown on what makes up this collection:"The Drowned Life""Ariadne's Mother""The Night Whiskey""A Few Things About Ants""Under the Bottom of the Lake""Present From The Past""The Mant...

The phrase ‘dream-like’ in relation to a work of fiction, particularly speculative fiction, is invoked with such regularity as to be rendered almost meaningless. Nevertheless it is the first thing I think of when it comes to describing Jeffrey Ford’s wonderful new collection of short stories, The Drowned Life. So many stories here contain the cock-eyed logic, sense of menace, dissolution of firm boundaries and Daliesque suspension of the laws of science, that it seems as if Ford has perfect reca...

This is an amazing collection. Jeffrey Ford is a relatively new discovery to me but it's immediately obvious that he's the real deal. If you dig dark, surreal speculative fiction, it doesn't get any better than this.

jeffrey ford is my new discovery... i stumbled into a reading of his at readercon in massachusetts back in july, and then a second one at the world fantasy convention in san diego a few weeks ago... went home after that, watched a video of a third reading of his on youtube and then promptly impulse-bought every book he ever wrote off the internet... been reading four of them at once over the past few weeks and imagine i will get through them all before the end of the year... really not sure how

The first two stories in this collection put this in the category of the best books of 2008 and in a high place in Ford’s work. These mix warm humor with stunning surrealism, black humored takes on death and life with disturbing imagery presented in an accessible way. “The Drowned Life” and “The Night Whisky” are worlds of dream and nightmares with funny friend as your navigator. This collection continues in quality and variety, the black comic absurdisms of “The Way he Does it” (reminding me of...

it's early and i'm not feeling eloquent, but: this book is stellar. the two stories mentioned in the description - deathberry, underwater world - are among the best in the book, but there are others just as delightfully odd and vivid. in fact, delightfully odd is probably the best way to describe this collection of short stories. there are a few stories that didn't quite grab me, but on the whole, Ford's use of language and character development is incredibly compelling.

One of the best short story writers working today, and this may be his best collection yet. The title story, "The Drowned Life" is nothing short of a minor miracle - poignant, surreal, scary and hilarious all at once. Excellent collection from a writer who is only getting better.

Hands down the best collection I've ever read. Nebula-Winner Ford's (The Well-Built City Trilogy) limitless imagination pops off the page in linguistic fireworks with narratives nestled like Russian dolls in his third collection, a 16-story opus that reads like a primer to the genres of speculative fiction. In "Night Whiskey," a bizarre small town celebrates the annual harvest of the deathberry, which grants passage to the afterlife for a single night. "The Dismantled Invention of Fate" follows

Absolutely incredible. I didn't want to read this, it sat on my shelf for a long old while before eventually I sighed, and picked it up.I was thrown away. Each story is beautiful, and unique and so so wonderfully written. 'The branches shook like the bottom lip of a woman on Thorazine.' Just ugh, lovely.

Wow. Most of these stories are stunning. They redefine to me what fantasy fiction can do. Maybe I've been missing the boat the past few years and this is nothing new, but it's opened my eyes to all kinds of possibilities.

A scattershot collection of stories. Only some i really liked. Night Whiskey was so good I’d read again.

Brilliant and unusual. A kind of fantastical realism in these books that reminds me of the spirit behind Grimm's fairy tales. Probably would be liked by fans of Gaiman. I am not traditionally a fan of fantasy or sci-fi, but I will definitely be seeking out more of this author's work!

Some of these stories really stuck with me. My favorite is The Scribble Mind.