The Empire of Ice Cream

Despite its award winning status, the title of this anthology led me to believe it was either young adult oriented or in the vein of the recent plethora of updated fairy tale collections. I was very pleased to find I was wrong. Jeffrey Ford is a highly intelligent, clever wordsmith that more closely resembles Bradbury and Wolfe than the Datlow/Windling crowd. Like his unstable scholar's work in "The Weight of Words", Ford's... Read Full Review

Jeffrey Ford has made quite an impression in the last few years, with several fine novels including the World Fantasy Award winning The Physiognomy, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, and The Girl in the Glass. But my favorite Ford works have been short fiction -- and it so happens that my personal favorites appear in this new collection, his second. The title story, indeed, is one of my favorite stories by anyone from the... Read Full Review

I'd seen a dramatic reading of "The Annals of Eelin-Ok" (one of the stories in this collection), an experience that has stuck with me much longer than most dramatic productions... Mr. Ford does not profess to be a playwright (yet), but he writes with SO much immediacy, whatever is happening in his stories is so important to his characters, that you get sucked into the stories very quickly - what is important to those characters... Read Full Review

Jeffrey Ford is AMAZING. There are not many authors I could describe as such, but he is one. Buy his book; this man is an undiscovered gem. His literary fantasy is gorgeous in the way he tells it and the stories themselves. As much as I devoured this anthology, I was also really disheartened when I turned the last page. To make myself feel better, I've been giving everyone I know copies of the book or encouraging him... Read Full Review

The Empire Of Ice Cream by Jeffrey Ford is an impressively engaging collection of fourteen of the author's most evocative and best crafted short stories. Intertwining fantasy, reality, the straight-up peculiar, The Empire Of Ice Cream showcases: The Annals of Eelin-Ok, Jupiter's Skull, A Night in the Tropics, The Beautiful Gelreesh, Boatman's Holiday, Botch Town, A Man of Light, The Green Word, Giant Land, Coffins on the River,... Read Full Review