Bennett Sims

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Articles

10 Books About Nonhuman Consciousness

Nov 14, 2023 | electricliterature.com | Benjamin Hale |Clarice Lispector |Bennett Sims

Skip to content Reading Lists Bennett Sims recommends stories that imagine what animals or inanimate objects might be thinking These 10 books take the imaginability of other minds as their explicit subject. Their writers are curious about nonhuman consciousness: could language reproduce that as well? In order to imagine what animals, plants, or objects might be thinking, these writers try to think those thoughts themselves. They wonder: what is it like to be an elephant, or a cockroach, or a...
Other Minds and Other Stories

Nov 14, 2023 | twodollarradio.com | Bennett Sims

BOOK CLUB & READER GUIDE: Questions and Topics for DiscussionClick here to view and/or download the Other Minds and Other Stories reader guide as a PDF. 1. In her review for the American Booksellers' Association, bookseller Caitlin Baker wrote that author Bennett Sims is “the master at exploring the horror in everyday mundane situations”: How do the varied stories in this collection fit that description?
Organ Meats

Sep 14, 2023 | publishersweekly.com | K-Ming Chang |Siân Hughes |Bennett Sims |Ed Park

K-Ming Chang. One World, $18 trade paper (288p) ISBN 978-0-593-44734-5In Chang’s bizarro and magnificent latest (after the collection Gods of Want), two teen girls resolve to become dogs. Best friends Anita Hsia and Rainie Tsai tie a red thread around their necks to bind their kinship and link them to the “motherly dog-headed women” Anita has seen in her dreams.
My Work

Sep 8, 2023 | publishersweekly.com | Bennett Sims |Ed Park |Edward Carey

Olga Ravn, trans. from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell. New Directions, $18.95 trade paper (416p) ISBN 978-0-8112-3471-9Ravn (The Employees) combines autofiction, criticism, and poetry for a remarkable experimental narrative that probes the dark side of pregnancy, childhood, and new motherhood.
Sun City

Sep 7, 2023 | publishersweekly.com | Siân Hughes |Bennett Sims |Ed Park

Matthew Minson. TLOED, $5.99 e-book (308p) ISBN 979-8-9854717-3-1Minson (Perspectives) unfurls a deliriously funny tale of retribution set in a Texas retirement community overrun by garden gnomes and feral pigs and controlled by a bullying board of directors. Seventy-year-old widower Cal Yarborough feels like he’s been sentenced to life in the Sun City senior independent living community.
Wrong Way

Aug 22, 2023 | publishersweekly.com | Joanne McNeil |Siân Hughes |Bennett Sims |Ed Park

Joanne McNeil. MCD, $18 trade paper (288p) ISBN 978-0-3746-1066-1McNeil (Lurking) portrays the ruthlessness of the gig economy in her intimate debut novel. Teresa, 48, has measured her life by her jobs. In her teenage years, she was a department store clerk. Since then, she’s been a bartender, a bank teller, and more. Recently, however, she’s stalled out with a string of unreliable temp jobs. Now, she sleeps on a daybed in a small rural home with her mom.
Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind

Aug 21, 2023 | publishersweekly.com | Bennett Sims |Ed Park |Edward Carey |Katherine Vaz

Molly McGhee. Astra House, $26 (296p) ISBN 978-1-66260-211-5In McGee’s darkly comic fantastical debut, an everyman hero attempts to crawl out of debt with a job as a Dream Auditor, which requires him to enter and alter other people’s dreams. Jonathan Abernathy, obliviously handsome, downtrodden, and inept, finds employment with the mysterious Archival Office, a government contractor that provides a productivity enhancement service to employers.