Blurbs

"Ben Loory's debut is a mesmerizing landscape of nightmares, daydreams, fables and parables—sometimes all four at once—that crackles with prose so spare and clean you'll swear you can see it gleam, with themes so intensely personal you'll want to weigh them in your palm and bear them away. Highly recommended."

-- Keith Dixon, author of Ghostfires

"Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day is that rare find—a book that excites the reader. These tales are hilarious and vertiginous in the calmly absurd manner of Lydia Davis, Jack Handey and Etgar Keret. With his first book, Ben Loory proves he's already a master of the sleight of hand."

-- Stewart O'Nan, author of A Prayer for the Dying

"If Mother Goose and Philip K. Dick had a love child, and Richard Brautigan raised him in Watermelon Sugar, he might write stories like Ben Loory."

-- Jonathan Evison, author of West of Here

"Ben Loory's haunting fables spin off puzzlements that stay with you long after you've put down the book."

-- Edward Packard, inventor of the Choose Your Own Adventure series

"Ben Loory's collection, Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day, is a unique accomplishment. Short, terse, and disquieting, his tales will compel readers to reflect upon our troubling times and grasp how our world has been turned upside down. In this respect they are post-modern fairy tales which do not promise false happiness but enlighten us about the distorted manner in which our world has been transformed. Loory has an unusual gift for seeing the bizarre and absurd occurrences in our society which appears to be on a relentless race to an ill-defined goal of progress. With his critical eye he lights upon the humor of human foibles and makes us aware of the snares that we set for ourselves."

-- Jack Zipes, editor of The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales

"If I ever have a kid, and want to open him up to the world of the possibly Impossible, I might do well to read to him from Ben Loory's Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day. His update on the lineage of magic and exploration of the terrored lining of the everyday is by turns enthralling, hopeful, surprising, funny, and ultimately a much needed reminder of the power of imaginative mythmaking in our fiction."

-- Blake Butler, author of There Is No Year

"Some write like a dream, but each of these impressive stories reads like one (even those written 'for day'). Disarmingly simple and startlingly profound, Ben Loory's tales take readers through a wholly original universe of whimsy and pathos, moral darkness and brilliantly illuminated truths. Like the best dreams, they resonate, linger and haunt long after the Ambien wears off."

-- James P. Othmer, author of The Futurist

"Ben Loory is a master cosmologist waiting to be discovered, with a parabolic telescope that will allow you to see right to the living heart, not of the matter, but of matter itself, of what matters."

-- Andrew Ramer, author of Little Pictures: Fiction for a New Age

"Late one night I made the mistake of walking through a narrow, dark alley to get to my car. A man stepped in front of me and began asking me questions that in any other situation would seem benign but in this case seemed menacing. Before letting me pass he said, 'After today, always remember how lucky you are.' The feelings that overcame me as I practically ran to my car—fear, confusion, relief, panic, joy—are some of the same feelings I encountered while reading, Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day. Unsettling and mesmerizing, these tiny tales will leave you wondering, like I did as I locked myself inside the safety of my car, 'What the hell just happened back there?'"

-- xTx, author of Normally Special

"Ben Loory's stories are small surprises of beauty and wonder — often tragic, sometimes comic, but always full of hope."

-- Mary Guterson, author of We Are All Fine Here

"Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day is a book that comes alive when you read it. It will stand on its own, pet your hair while you sleep, and hold the umbrella over your head in the rain."

-- Aaron Dietz, author of Super

"Ben Loory is a writer who makes me feel less alone in the world. He also makes me feel like the world is more — and not less — absurd than I had originally suspected, which always comes as a strange relief. All of this is another way of saying that Loory is an original, and a good one, and someone well worth reading. Funny, weird, insightful, and wry. A giver of wincing laughter. I recommend him highly and could easily see several cults forming around his work. Good cults, too. Not the staid, mediocre variety."

-- Brad Listi, author of Attention. Deficit. Disorder.

"Writing is the art of speaking well, and this first collection by Ben Loory demonstrates exceptional precision and control in the demanding form of the short-short story. More than three dozen examples are presented here in just 200 pages, all told by a clean, unpretentious voice that is refreshingly straightforward, charming and thought-provoking. The result is quite unlike anything else I have read, a singular work that seems content to explore a universe all its own, in the manner of, say, 'Kubla Khan' or The Circus of Dr. Lao. (Try to imagine Kenneth Patchen's Poemscapes crossed with David Sedaris's animal fables, minus the jokey punchlines.) The cumulative effect is not cloying but strangely exhilarating, both for its deadpan considerations of life and death and the things that happen in between, and for some unexpected revelations about the essence of storytelling that arise from its stripped-down style. It will be exciting to see what this quietly fearless writer publishes next."

-- Dennis Etchison, author of The Dark Country

"This guy can write!"

-- Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451