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Published Nov 2023
202 pages
Genre: Short Stories
Paperback Original.
Publication Information
From the award-winning author of A Questionable Shape and White Dialogues, a brilliant, anxious, and hilarious new collection.
A man lends his phone to a stranger in the mall, setting off an uncanny series of Unknown calls that come to haunt his relationship with jealousy and dread. A well-meaning locavore tries to butcher his backyard chickens humanely, only to find himself absorbed into the absurd violence of the pecking order. A student applying for a philosophy fellowship struggles to project himself into the thoughts of his hypothetical judges, becoming increasingly possessed and overpowered by the problem of other minds. And in "The Postcard," a private detective is hired to investigate a posthumous message that a widower has seemingly received from his dead wife, leading him into a foggy landscape of lost memories, shifting identities, and strange doublings.
Cerebral and eerie, captivating and profound, these twelve stories expertly guide us through the paranoia and obsession of everyday horrors, not least the horrors of overthinking what other people might be thinking. With all of Sims's trademark virtuosity, innovation, and wit, Other Minds and Other Stories continues to expand the possibilities of contemporary fiction.
"[Bennett Sims] draws on academia, art, and technology for a superb collection about identity and memory.... Throughout, Sims boldly plays with form, such as in 'Introduction to the Reading of Hegel,' which consists of one paragraph that extends for nearly 30 pages and chronicles an adjunct professor's self-sabotage as he attempts to apply for a prestigious fellowship. Here and elsewhere, the prose is shot through with pitch-perfect observations and dark undercurrents... These brilliant stories are hard to shake." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"This ambitious collection finds the right balance of familiar and experimental." —Kirkus Reviews
"These stories are full of intellectual, philosophical and linguistic wonders. With a keen eye for the moments when the contemporary world turns to self-cannibalism, with ears attuned to the music of the language, Bennett Sims is one of the finest writers working in America today." —Yiyun Li, author of The Book of Goose
"Patiently, placidly, with exquisite technique and implacable logic, the mad master Bennett Sims erects gorgeous edifices of thought and bricks us inside while we admire the craftsmanship. It takes rare talent to make the prison of solipsism seem so inviting." —Adam Ehrlich Sachs, author of Inherited Disorders and The Organs of Sense
"In Other Minds and Other Stories, Bennett Sims patiently parses the movements of consciousnesses increasingly colonized by media technology and turns the screws on the banalities of contemporary life until the uncanny irrupts from them. Following on White Dialogues, the twelve stories in this collection confirm Sims as a virtuoso of the form, and one of the best writers working in America today." —Ryan Ruby, author of The Zero and the One
"Bennett Sims belongs to that almost extinct category of fiction writers whose lexical virtuosity, besides being a joy to read, reminds us the English language can thrive outside the tired phraseologies of everyday life. Whether he's examining glitches of intersubjectivity, or the generative power of blank faces in a sarcophagus, his obsessive inquisitiveness enlivens every page of Other Minds and Other Stories." —Mauro Javier Cardenas, author of Aphasia and The Revolutionaries Try Again
This information about Other Minds and Other Stories was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Bennett Sims is the author of the novel A Questionable Shape, which received the Bard Fiction Prize and was a finalist for The Believer Book Award, as well as the story collection White Dialogues, which was awarded the Rome Prize for Literature. He is a recipient of a Michener-Copernicus Society Fellowship. His fiction has appeared in A Public Space, Conjunctions, Electric Literature, Tin House, and Zoetrope: All-Story, as well as in the Pushcart Prize Anthology. He has taught at Bard College, Grinnell College, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
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