• Winner of the 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 delivers a disquisition on the idea of the zombie, combining low and high culture in a firework display of extended metaphors, obscure vocabulary and intellectual sparks. With a heavy debt to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and vigorous nods to Nabokov, Heidegger, Tarkovsky, Shklovsky, Levinas and Proust, to mention a few, the book is ambitious and thought-provoking.
--Jane Housham, The Guardian

Mazoch discovers an unreturned movie envelope, smashed windows, and a pool of blood in his father's house: the man has gone missing. So he creates a list of his father's haunts and asks Vermaelen to help track him down. However, hurricane season looms over Baton Rouge, threatening to wipe out any undead not already contained and eliminate all hope of ever finding Mazoch's father.

Bennett Sims turns typical zombie fare on its head to deliver a wise and philosophical rumination on the nature of memory and loss.

The New Classics series aims to celebrate the enduring cultural impact that publications have made by refreshing these evergreen titles with cover designs and new introductions by acclaimed writers and artists that speak to the resonance and relevance of these works.

* An ABA December 2023 Indie Next List pick.
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.

Additional reading:

For Necessary Fiction, Other Minds and Other Stories author Bennett Sims contributes to the Research Notes series, where authors describe their process for a recent book: Necessary Fiction's Research Notes by Bennett Sims November 17, 2023

For Electric Literature, Other Minds and Other Stories author Bennett Sims recommends 10 Books About Nonhuman Consciousness November 14, 2023

Read an excerpt:
BOMB Magazine hosts an excerpt of the short story Medusa from Bennett Sims' Other Minds and Other Stories: MEDUSA by BENNETT SIMS
Literary Hub hosts an excerpt of the short story Other Minds from Bennett Sims' Other Minds and Other Stories: OTHER MINDS by BENNETT SIMS
Menagerie Magazine hosts an excerpt of the short story The New Violence from Bennett Sims' Other Minds and Other Stories: THE NEW VIOLENCE by BENNETT SIMS
Ploughshares hosts an excerpt of the short story Pecking Order from Bennett Sims' Other Minds and Other Stories: PECKING ORDER by BENNETT SIMS

*Winner of the Rome Prize for Literature 2018-19
*Named one of the Best Books of the Year --Bookforum

Synopsis
With all the brilliance, bravado, and wit of his award-winning debut, A Questionable Shape, Bennett Sims returns with an equally ambitious and wide-ranging collection of stories.

A house-sitter alone in a cabin in the woods comes to suspect that the cabin may need to be unghosted. A raconteur watches as his personal story is rewritten on an episode of This American Life. And in the collection's title story, a Hitchcock scholar sitting in on a Vertigo lecture is gradually driven mad by his own theory of cinema.

In these eleven stories, Sims moves from slow-burn psychological horror to playful comedy, bringing us into the minds of people who are haunted by their environments, obsessions, and doubts. Told in electric, insightful prose, White Dialogues is a profound exploration of the way we uncover meaning in a complex, and sometimes terrifying, world. It showcases Sims's rare talent and confirms his reputation as one of the most exciting young writers at work today.

*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

Mazoch discovers an unreturned movie envelope, smashed windows, and a pool of blood in his father's house: the man has gone missing. So he creates a list of his father's haunts and asks Vermaelen to help track him down.

However, hurricane season looms over Baton Rouge, threatening to wipe out any undead not already contained and eliminate all hope of ever finding Mazoch's father.

Bennett Sims turns typical zombie fare on its head to deliver a wise and philosophical rumination on the nature of memory and loss.

The smartest zombie novel since Colson Whitehead's Zone One. --Ron Charles, Washington Post

In a style that's both personal and analytical, retired Episcopal Bishop Bennett Sims offers a penetrating critique of the extremist religious and political assumptions that underlie the domestic and foreign policies of President George W. Bush. He contrasts two radically opposed conceptions of power. Both concepts are found in the Hebrew-Christian Scriptures.

The concept of power represented by the President is the centuries-old one of male-dominant, militarist imperialism, co-opted in recent history by a fierce Fundamentalism that forecasts an imminent and violent end of history. The other is the enduring power of compassion, justice, and nonviolence exemplified by the Hebrew prophets and Jesus of Nazareth. This book celebrates the movement of prophetic power from the shadows of history to the
foreground of political action.