Bennett Sims

Bennett Sims is the author of the short story collection White Dialogues and the novel A Questionable Shape, which received the Bard Fiction Prize and was a finalist for The Believer Book Award. He is a recipient of a Michener-Copernicus Society Fellowship and winner of the Rome Prize for Literature 2018-19. 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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White Dialogues
"In this wise, witty, and often deeply moving collection of stories Bennett Sims proves himself to be a master of many forms. He can find sinister obsession in a lawn mower or a scrabble board, he can find life and death in a lizard. He takes his reader to the moon—“Not even death is an outside for the dead”—and back. He is the heir to the Nabokov of Pale Fire even as his voice is entirely his own. The title story, “White Dialogues,” serves as an emblem for the book as a whole. Here is a writer who is always directing our attention to what we have failed to see, giving voice, beautifully, unnervingly to the unsaid."
—Margot Livesey

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."
—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!