A Questionable Shape

by Bennett Sims

Overview

*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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781937512101
Publisher:	Two Dollar Radio
Publication date:	04/26/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	222
Sales rank:	935,191
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	17 - 18 Years

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

The zombie novel gets an existential makeover in this ambitious debut set in a Baton Rouge overrun by reanimated corpses. Order has more or less been restored, but Michael Vermaelen lives with a crippling fear of the virus that is only surpassed by his obsession with what it's like to experience it. When his friend Matt Mazoch discovers his father has been infected and is missing, they devote the month of July to finding him before the start of the hurricane season. Sims's thoughtfully rendered portrait of the epidemic avoids brain-spattered gore and instead focuses on the impulses of the undead and what shred of selfhood remains as they return to wander through "nostalgically charged sites from their former lives." As Mazoch and Vermaelen search Mr. Mazoch's old stomping grounds) the decisions they will inevitably face if they find him consume Vermaelen and worry his lover Rachel who fears a violent Mazoch will try to put his father out of his misery. Frequent and lengthy footnotes ("digging a grave in the text") are tedious and distracting at times, but allow Sims to explore the philosophical implications of a zombie outbreak, especially how identity, mortality, memory, and loss can be understood in its wake. With its erudite references that range from Euripedes to Heidegger to Hitchcock films, Sims's debut is essential reading for zombie fans not afraid to use their brains. (May)

Publishers Weekly

• Bard Fiction Prize 2014 Winner
• 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

"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

"[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

Praise for White Dialogues:

• Winner of the Rome Prize for Literature 2018-19
• One of the Best Books of 2017 —Bookforum

"A brilliant... story collection by possibly the smartest and most inventive writer of his... generation.

—Tony Tulathimutte, Bookforum, "Best Books of the Year"

"One of the most genuinely terrifying, brilliant short story collections of the past decade. These stories are so smart and so unsettling; every sentence will unnerve you. He’s 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. (He also has a criminally underrated novel, A Questionable Shape.)"

—Carmen Maria Machado, Lit Hub

"Sims’s debut story collection elegantly explores the ordinary and fantastic terrors lurking in the deepest recesses of the psyche... This is a cerebral collection for fans of smart, philosophical fiction that is not afraid to follow thought experiments to their most chilling conclusions."

—Publishers Weekly

“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.”

—Hannah Pittard, New York Times Book Review

"These 11 cerebral, uncanny stories marry horror, pop culture, metafiction, and cinema, and the result is a collection unlike any other in recent memory. If you like David Foster Wallace, Godzilla, or both, you need this book."

—The Week

"There are some clever literary stunts scattered throughout this collection, but there’s no doubting the inventiveness of the author’s prose, pacing, and ability to build tension and occasionally dispel it with laughter... A deft collection of spooky fables that pivots from classic stylings to postmodern irony."

—Kirkus

"Showcasing an ingenious and darkly subversive mind, White Dialogues is a head-trip worth taking."

—Shelf Awareness

Praise for Other Minds and Other Stories:

"[Bennett Sims] draws on academia, art, and technology for a superb collection about identity and memory.... Throughout, Sims boldly plays with form, such as in 'Introduction to the Reading of Hegel,' which consists of one paragraph that extends for nearly 30 pages and chronicles an adjunct professor’s self-sabotage as he attempts to apply for a prestigious fellowship. Here and elsewhere, the prose is shot through with pitch-perfect observations and dark undercurrents... These brilliant stories are hard to shake."

—Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Bennett Sims is one of the finest writers working in America today.”

—Yiyun Li, author of The Book of Goose

"One of the best writers working in America today."

—Ryan Ruby, author of The Zero and the One

"Bennett Sims belongs to that almost extinct category of fiction writers whose lexical virtuosity, besides being a joy to read, reminds us the English language can thrive outside the tired phraseologies of everyday life.”

—Mauro Javier Cardenas, author of Aphasia and The Revolutionaries Try Again

"Bennett Sims is a pioneer and peerless master of psychological horror.”

—Tony Tulathimutte, author of Private Citizens

From the Publisher