Bennett Sims was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He is the author of the novel A Questionable Shape, which received the Bard Fiction Prize and was a finalist for The Believer Book Award, and the short story collection White Dialogues which was named one of the Best Books of the Year by Bookforum. His stories have appeared in A Public Space, Conjunctions, Electric Literature, Tin House, Zoetrope: All-Story, and the 2015 Pushcart Prize Anthology. He has taught fiction at Bard College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and is a winner of the Rome Prize for Literature 2018-19.
* Winner of the Rome Prize for Literature 2018-19
* Bard Fiction Prize 2014
*The Believer Book Award Finalist
* One of the Best Books of 2013 --Complex Magazine, Book Riot,
Slate, The L Magazine, NPR's 'On Point', Salon"[Bennett 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, and it is one of my personal and
professional goals to make that happen."
--Carmen Maria Machado, LitHub"Equal parts David Foster Wallace and
Richard Matheson [...] A Questionable Shape is certainly the first
Proustian zombie novel, but hopefully not the last horror novel of
ideas."
--Slate"A Questionable Shape is a novel for those who read in order
to wake up to life, not escape it, for those who themselves like to
explore the frontiers of the unsayable. [A Questionable Shape] is
more than just a novel. It is literature. It is life."
--The Millions"[An] extraordinary novel."
--Los Angeles Review of Books"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"Sims allows us at least a glimpse of
the monstrous weight we all lug on our individual trudges through
daily life."
--The Collagist"Ambitious [and] thoughtfully rendered. Sims's debut
is essential reading."
--Publishers Weekly"So many layers of brilliant."
--Diagram"Bennett Sims has embarked on a unique literary journey;
join him now and fight the bite."
--NewPages "The smartest zombie novel since Colson Whitehead's Zone
One."
--Ron Charles, Washington Post"A Questionable Shape presents the
yang to the yin of Whitehead's Zone One, with chess games, a dinner
invitation, and even a romantic excursion. Echoes of [Thomas]
Bernhard's hammering circularity and [David Foster] Wallace's
bright mind that can't stop making connections are both present.
The point is where the mind goes, and, in that respect, Sims has
his thematic territory down cold."
--The Daily Beast"Evokes the power of David Foster Wallace with a
narrative that's cerebral, strangely beautiful, philosophical, and
pretty, well, brilliant."
--Bustle"Unlike anything I'd ever read. Underlying the seemingly
quirky subject matter of Sims's novel is a notable linguistic
dynamism and impressive command of philosophical challenges. Sims'
work has a life of its own."
--Full Stop"A Questionable Shape places a new spin on zombie
fiction, so very much recommended."
--Midwest Book Review"Sims brings a supercharged literary erudition
to that initial story idea and manages to take A Questionable Shape
in a direction very different than its cinematic and literary
precursors. A Questionable Shape is downright infectious."
--Iowa Press-Citizen"Compressed, copiously footnoted and literary,
Bennett Sims' A Questionable Shape focuses on a zombie outbreak's
effect on a young man and his girlfriend in a single week, in which
he and his best friend undertake a quixotic, zombie-strewn search
for a missing father."
--Los Angeles Times "Bennett Sims is insanely talented. Over and
over again, Sims demonstrates astonishing skill with image. In the
details of his characters, Sims is nothing short of brilliant. [A
Questionable Shape is] an extraordinarily prodigious debut
novel."
--Electric Literature's 'The Outlet' "A thinking fan's zombie
novel... one that asks the question: Do we lose our humanity when
the world starts to crumble?"
--Atlanta Journal-Constitution"My favorite novel of 2013...
complex, erudite, and profoundly affecting. A Questionable Shape,
Sims' debut, reveals him to be a writer of great range, depth, and
intelligence, who has only just begun to show us what he has to
say... Groundbreaking."
--The American Reader"Yes, it's a zombie novel, but also an
emotionally resonant meditation on memory and loss."
--San Francisco Chronicle"Sims demonstrates he isn't just
smart--he's brilliant; his book's not beautiful--it's gorgeous.
It's sensitive, insightful and ruminative, which aren't always
things you get to say about zombie fiction, let alone most
books."
--The L Magazine"Brilliantly sensitive, whip-smart... Sims' genius
lies in how he builds a terrifically engrossing and utterly unique
novel, not in spite, but rather because of the familiarity of the
material. A book that is just as touching and funny as it is
riotously smart."
--The Rumpus"[A Questionable Shape is] much more W.G. Sebald than
George A. Romero. And I loved it. Bennett Sims: you are a brilliant
writer. A Questionable Shape was a huge success for me. It's easily
one of the best books I'll read this year."
--Book Riot"With nods to Hamlet and Orpheus (not to mention
Tarkovsky and Wittgenstein), Sims's novel is a learned debut
informed not just by erudition, but by nature, desire, and the
persistence of memory."
--KRUI Lit Show"Spectacular... makes us turn the pages faster than
a scene of survivors frantically boarding up a farmhouse ever
could."
--Tottenville Review"Deeply thoughtful... Full of footnotes and
digressions, the novel is both a dark adventure story and a
meditation on what it means when someone you love is lost to
you."
--Poets & Writers"A Questionable Shape is the best book I have read
this year. I suspect it will still hold top honors when the year
comes to a close many months hence. A Questionable Shape is
unquestionably a major accomplishment."
--The Gazette"This ain't your granddaddy's zombie-apocalypse.
Everything in Bennett Sims's stunning debut courts a topographical
and invasive examination of the human condition through our
inverse. The architecture of zombie-logic is rewired, and the
undead become symbolic for what it means to exist in all its
physical and existential, its beauty and brutality."
--HTML Giant"Bennett Sims is a writer fearsomely equipped with an
intellectual and linguistic range to rival a young Nabokov's,
Nicholson Baker's gift for miniaturistic intaglio, and an arsenal
of virtuosities entirely his own. A Questionable Shape announces a
literary talent of genre-wrecking brilliance."
--Wells Tower"Bennett Sims' A Questionable Shape is a book I feel
like I've been searching for for years but have yet to find, until
now. Sims' humble, cerebral, and addictively engaging narrator,
comfortable expostulating on videogames as well as Wittgenstein
against the backdrop of a zombie apocalypse, marries highbrow to
low, blends genre conventions with a ravenous intellectual
curiosity and depth, and delivers one of the bravest, funniest, and
strangest narratives I've come across in recent memory. At times
you'll find yourself comparing it to Thomas Bernhard, David Foster
Wallace, or Nicholson Baker, and then find the comparison lacking,
not because this book is in any way inferior to these writers, but
because it is as good or better, and moreover, unlike them in that
it is its own bizarre animal, idiosyncratic and utterly new."
--Benjamin Hale"In A Questionable Shape everything is
questioned--love, family, memory, the way we lead our lives. Even
loss itself seems obsolete in these worn out Zombified days. And
yet, out beyond the margins of genre, two young men embark on a
search as worthy as Walker Percy's in The Moviegoer, taking us into
a fascinating textual netherworld of footnotes full of Heidegger
and haiku, leading us on a journey as ancient and true as a son's
desperate search for a father whose undead life may not be worse
than the broken existence he left behind. Bennett Sims brings an
allusive genius energy to everything from YouTube to Euripides in
this inquiry into what survives the onslaught, in a world-our
world, we come to recognize--suffering a major case of apocalypse
fatigue."
--Charles D'Ambrosio"A Questionable Shape is part George A. Romero,
part Thomas Bernhard--as much an epistemology of the zombie as it
is a thriller. So fascinating are its--and, within the constraints
of its topic, so wide-ranging - that reading it I often had the
unusual experience of pausing to wander down some byway of thought
and finding myself unable to say whether I had ventured there
independently or was remembering a footnote from earlier in the
book. It's playful, absorbing, bittersweet, and intelligent, and,
like a bite, it gets under your skin."
--Kevin Brockmeier"How would the textures of ordinary life be
altered by the return of the recently dead? What would zombie
consciousness itself be like? Would it gravitate toward the most
powerful memories and impressions of life? Or is a zombie a
creature on whom habit operates more powerfully than novelty? In A
Questionable Shape, the spectacular horror of zombies has been
removed to the background. Instead, this novel is about walking,
driving, reading, waking up, going on dates, taking care of friends
and parents and children, grocery shopping. It also includes some
of the most exquisite descriptions of light that I have ever read.
Striking, beautiful, funny, and not like anything else."
--Aaron Kunin
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