Bennett Sims
ABOUT the author
Bennett Sims was born and raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He is the author of the story collection Other Minds and Other Stories (2023), the novel A Questionable Shape (2013), which received the Bard Fiction Prize and was a finalist for The Believer Book Award, and the story collection White Dialogues (2017), winner of the Rome Prize for Literature 2018–19 and named a best book of 2017 by Bookforum. 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.
Available from Two Dollar Radio
Other Minds and Other Stories
"[Sims is] kind of like if Alfred Hitchcock and Brian Evenson raised a baby with David Foster Wallace and Nicholson Baker. Sims should be a household name in horror."
—Carmen Maria Machado, LitHub
White Dialogues
"Anyone who admires such pyrotechnics of language will find 21st-century echoes of Edgar Allan Poe in Sims’s portraits of paranoia and delusion, with their zodiacal narrowing and the maddening tungsten spin of their narratives."
—New York Times Book Review
A Questionable Shape
"A Questionable Shape is a rewriting of the genre in rather literal sense. Sims’s zombie novel perhaps contains the highest proportion of great descriptions of light per page since Proust. The zombie installs at the heart of the novel a perspective from which the polymorphous dynamics of the human experience of light disappear."
—Tobias Carroll, Los Angeles Review of Books
Interviews
Read:
Green Apple Books interview with Bennett Sims | 7/10/2013
Green Apple Books talks with Bennett about footnotes, zombies, comparison books, and more!
Q&A with Bennett Sims | 1/19/2017
We talk with Bennett about his forthcoming collection White Dialogues, his process for story writing, lowbrow vs. highbrow, and the influence of cinema on his work. Read on!
Interview with Bennett Sims | 6/18/2013
Meredith Turits talks with Bennett Sims about philosophy, his hometown of Baton Rouge, and more!
The American Reader Interview with Bennett Sims | 2/10/2014
Nathan Goldman talks with Bennett about expectations for his novel A Questionable Shape, why zombies appeal to our culture, and more!
