December 20, 2017
The editing and proofreading and thousand other things that go into putting a book together are thankfully finished and my story collection Home and Castle is at last coming out in early January. (see www.snakenationpress.org for the Editor’s statement and further details). Most of the stories in it were originally published in literary journals such as: The Madison Review, Carve, Blue Penny Quarterly, The Beacon Street Review, Solstice, The Mud Season Review and others. The stories attempt to examine the quirky detours of modern middle class life with all its inevitable quandaries and skirmishes.
A man who frequently gets mistaken for someone else decides to impersonate a stranger’s long lost classmate. An ordinary bureaucrat lucks into a fortune and retires early with unhappy social consequences. A divorced father confronts ghosts of his past when he takes his daughter to Disneyland. A commuter falls asleep on the train and with time to kill, wanders into an unfamiliar bookstore where he meets a woman who may or may not be a former lover. A jealous husband finds a new way to disrupt Christmas. A couple moves to a gated community that’s a far cry from what they imagined. Jacob Appel, author of numerous acclaimed novels and story collections including Millard Salter’s Last Day, said the book “is a first-rate collection that grapples with the toxic anxieties of contemporary America and tackles tough questions head-on—but with a blend of insight, empathy and humor.”
Much has been said about the capacity of fiction to generate empathy for other point of view and science seems to bear that out. In an era of increasing tribalism, few traits are more needed than the one which compels us to hear the other voice, feel the unusual or contradictory experience. We need not agree with different perceptions but must be able to get to the root of them before any sort of understanding can take place. Despite all the work that went into this collection, I’ve met a great group of writers, editors and folks interested in literary fiction who are keepers of the flame of the written word and who have been unfailingly supportive. I’m grateful to all of them.
THOMAS BENZ graduated with a B.A. in English from the University of Notre Dame. He recently won the 2017 Serena McDonald Kennedy Award for a short story collection called “Home and Castle.” The book is to be published by Snake Nation Press in the fall. In the last several years, he has had fifteen stories (…read more)