“Home and Castle 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. This is a major literary debut, one not to be missed.”
Jacob M. Appel, author of The Amazing Mr. Morality and Millard Salter’s Last Day, winner of numerous awards including the Hudson Prize.
“Some of the stories, like “Trouble with the Magi,” are wildly funny, and others, like “Casual Impostor,” toy with the surreal, and all of the stories are touching as they probe the interior life of men who make bad decisions. Bad decisions that are the stuff of fiction, after all. Benz writes with uncommon insight, wit, and grace…This story collection is terrific.”
Lynn Sloan. Author of “This Far is Not Far Enough.”
“Home and Castle is an extraordinary short story collection by Thomas Benz… These are stories about middle-class men each caught in a brief space of time when so many things in their lives are changing, disappearing, or dying. All their middle-class values are in flux: marriage, divorce, parenting, romance, and jobs…The book is the perfect accompaniment to an evening by a fireside with a snifter of cognac, a good friend, and a Thomas Benz story to discuss. The writing is so rich and honed that each story lingered in my thoughts long afterward.”
Marssie Mancotti, Windy City Reviews
“The central characters in Thomas Benz’s thought-provoking, offbeat, and often hilarious new story collection, Home & Castle, experience several varieties of alienation–from neighbors, from casual acquaintances, from co-workers, and sometimes from their own romantic partners. ….Through his thoughtful, darkly funny, and moving stories, Benz gives us many opportunities to examine the limitations of human understanding and empathy, and to consider how we might develop more of both.”
Beth Castrodale, Small Press Picks
“A brilliant, original and yet quite representative collection of Benz’s literary abilities.”
Andy Jordan, Midwest Book Review
“Tom Benz’s marvelous stories of life in the American suburbs will remind you of John Cheever but with a subjective empathy and wry vulnerability that are wrenching.”
Peter Ferry, Author of Old Heart, winner of Chicago Writers Association Best Novel Award
“Rightly compared to Updike and Cheever, Benz’s prose dazzles more for its devastating accuracy than linguistic pyrotechnics.” He “sharpens the tools of earlier literary traditions into cutting–yet humane–observations of the hazards present in our culture of comfort and convenience, with striking clarity, insight, and an intimacy bordering on clairvoyance.”
William Grabowski, IndieReader
“Benz’s writing is a lyrical wave of softness that washes over the reader, slowly, sometimes sleepily, and the stories begin to feel less read and more felt or almost experienced. Benz’s writing is refined, funny and often sarcastic in a perfectly resonating way. By no means a speed-read, Home and Castle is a beautiful collection nonetheless.”
Jaclyn Bauer, Centered on Books
“Reading this collection is like poring through a handful of rare gemstones, each one lovelier and more intricate than the last.”
Abby Geni, author of “The Lightkeepers” and “The Wildlands,” to be released in the Fall, 2018
“The deftly crafted short stories comprising the latest anthology of his work, “Home and Castle” continue to reveal and showcase Thomas Benz’s genuine flair for narrative storytelling and his undeniably skill at engaging the full and rapt attention of his readers. A brilliant, original, and yet quite representative collection of Benz’s literary abilities…”
Andy Jordan, Midwest Book Review
My writing tends to gravitate toward certain themes: misunderstanding, romantic discord, the struggles of being a parent, conflict with a community’s prevailing ethos, and the characters’ frequent sense of exclusion from an accepted place in society. I like fictional situations where people are placed under stress, often due to their own mistakes, so that they end up reacting in a pivotal and unforeseen manner.
So here you will find: a guy unwittingly drops a torrid love note in the church collection basket; a jealous husband finds a unique way of seeking revenge against a romantic rival during a Christmas nativity play; a character who runs an independent wake up call service has trouble getting a crucial call of his own; a message written on a dollar bill and released into circulation somehow finds its way into the right hands; a father who plans to miss his daughter’s birthday party seeks the counsel of a friend who specializes in the “perfect excuse,” a condo owner is unwillingly elected president of the association’s board with disastrous consequences, a beleaguered character finds refuge in the treehouse of a neighbor and becomes an unintended spy; a man who is mistaken for someone else decides to impersonate him following the clues in the conversation. It may be tragedy of a sort but only in a minor key, the parried slings and arrows of modern relationship.
I enjoy the stuff of ordinary life, which, through a sequence of escalating difficulties, suddenly becomes remarkable and strange. I like depictions of the world that attempt to balance minor tragedies with irony and an occasional touch of humor. Also, the writers I most admire pay attention to the sound and rhythm of words, take risks with language and metaphor. It’s wonderful when the great ones create a structure of imagery beneath the surface of a story that seems to integrate it in some mysterious way.
Much has been said about the capacity of fiction to generate empathy for other points of view and science appears 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.
By its very nature, fiction also helps cultivate and preserve language as the primary means of apprehending the world. While the proliferation of movies and videos and photographs and emojis are a marvelous addition to our lives, only language enables the recipient to bring his or her full imagination to the encounter. A novel or collection of stories uniquely engages a reader to construct a world right along with the author, to infuse what’s been created with a unique filter, to make the abstract visible in one’s own mind. If a “picture is worth a thousand words,” it cannot do quite the same thing as those words. In our rush to compress, to abbreviate, to go faster, to live more and more, this might be something we should not allow ourselves to forget.
~Tom Benz
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)