A Questionable Shape

"A Questionable Shape is a novel for those who read in order to wake up to life, not escape it, for those who themselves like to explore the frontiers of the unsayable. I envision the core readership as brilliant and slightly disaffected men and women... fans of Anne Carson, Nicholson Baker, Rivka Galchen, Juan Rulfo, W.G. Sebald, Henry and William James, and gaggles of Russian and German writers. [A Questionable Shape] is more than just a novel. It is literature. It is life."
-The Millions

"Brilliantly sensitive, whip-smart... Sims’ genius lies in how he builds a terrifically engrossing and utterly unique novel, not in spite, but rather because of the familiarity of the material. A book that is just as touching and funny as it is riotously smart."
-The Rumpus

"Bennett Sims is a writer fearsomely equipped with an intellectual and linguistic range to rival a young Nabokov's, Nicholson Baker's gift for miniaturistic intaglio, and an arsenal of virtuosities entirely his own. A Questionable Shape announces a literary talent of genre-wrecking brilliance."
-Wells Tower

"Bennett Sims' A Questionable Shape is a book I feel like I've been searching for for years but have yet to find, until now. Sims' humble, cerebral, and addictively engaging narrator, comfortable expostulating on videogames as well as Wittgenstein against the backdrop of a zombie apocalypse, marries highbrow to low, blends genre conventions with a ravenous intellectual curiosity and depth, and delivers one of the bravest, funniest, and strangest narratives I've come across in recent memory. At times you'll find yourself comparing it to Thomas Bernhard, David Foster Wallace, or Nicholson Baker, and then find the comparison lacking, not because this book is in any way inferior to these writers, but because it is as good or better, and moreover, unlike them in that it is its own bizarre animal, idiosyncratic and utterly new."
-Benjamin Hale

Mazoch discovers an unreturned movie sleeve, a smashed window, 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.
Bennett Sims was born and raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. His fiction has appeared in A Public Space, Tin House, and Zoetrope: All-Story. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he currently teaches at the University of Iowa, where he is the Provost Postgraduate Visiting Writer in fiction.