- 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.
Bennett Sims was born and raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He is the author of the story collection
Other Minds and Other Stories (2023), the novel
A Questionable Shape (2013), which received the Bard Fiction Prize and was a finalist for
The Believer Book Award, and the story collection
White Dialogues (2017), winner of the Rome Prize for Literature 2018-19 and named a best book of 2017 by
Bookforum. He is a recipient of a Michener-Copernicus Society Fellowship. His fiction has appeared in
A Public Space,
Conjunctions,
Electric Literature,
Tin House, and
Zoetrope: All-Story, as well as in the Pushcart Prize Anthology. He has taught at Bard College, Grinnell College, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House, the graphic novel The Low, Low Woods, and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of "The New Vanguard," one of "15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century."
Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Vogue, This American Life, Harper's Bazaar, Tin House, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the former Abrams Artist-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Brooklyn.
