2/18/2024 0 Comments Your narrator face![]() That is the central concern or curiosity of the title story in this collection. Whether it is non-human minds, from ghosts to snowflakes, or whether it is ekphrastic minds, wondering what an artist might’ve been thinking when making an artwork or wondering what another reader or viewer of that artwork might’ve been thinking when they experienced it. Whether it is an animal mind, like a story about a man beheading some chickens in his backyard. In the new collection, most of the stories are about characters confronted with another mind, whether it’s another human mind, like a jealous partner who’s wondering if his partner is unfaithful to him. My narrator spends a lot of that novel trying to project himself inside the head of the undead and wondering what it is like to be undead. I wanted to write a novel where Hollywood zombies were approached like philosopher zombies in the sense that my characters are mostly preoccupied with questions about their consciousness. I was really motivated by a fascination and curiosity with both Hollywood zombies and the problem of subjectivity and mind-body philosophy. My first novel, A Questionable Shape, is a zombie novel without zombies. SIMS: Thank you for that question, and I love that axiom. ![]() I thought I’d ask you about the question of the problem of other minds in epistemology, which seems to be an ongoing concern of yours back to your debut, A Questionable Shape. I wanted to begin by considering the title of your new collection, Other Minds and Other Stories. RUBY: The reason I ask is because in the follow-up to that book, Jacques Roubaud talks about what he calls “the Gertrude Stein axiom.” According to the Gertrude Stein axiom, a book is the biography of its title. RYAN RUBY: I forget, Bennett, are you a fan of the Oulipian writer Jacques Roubaud?īENNETT SIMS: I have read The Great Fire of London and enjoyed it, but I have not read much else. Recently, over Zoom, I was able to get him to tell me more about some of the technical challenges and considerations involved in generating his new collection Other Minds and Other Stories, which was published last week by Two Dollar Radio. (He is one of the few people whose arguments have persuaded me to reconsider some of my most-cherished critical opinions which, with apologies for being coy, I will not reveal here ). ![]() As I’ve learned from our many subsequent conversations, he is not only a first-rate practitioner, he also has a fine-grained understanding of how fiction works. Sebald for the age of digital media.īennett divides his time between Iowa City, where he teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program, and Berlin, where he and I met in 2017. ![]() He is, in my view, one of the most successful importers to contemporary American fiction of the narrative techniques of European late modernism-the sensibility of David Lynch crossed with style of W.G. With his debut novel A Questionable Shape, and his first short story collection, White Dialogues, Bennett established a reputation as a master of psychological horror. A group in the backyard fell into a round of the classic parlor game: who is the most talented writer of our generation? The host-most recently, the author of the 1,000-page epic The Logos, and thus no slouch in his own right-and I both gave the same answer: Bennett Sims. Last month, I attended a boozy party at the Brooklyn apartment of the novelist Mark de Silva.
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