Then Disappear & Then Rise Again: An Interview with Ben Loory
Ben Loory’s first book, Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day, will be published next month.
Shane Jones works in an office building 40 to 50 hours a week in Albany New York.
* * *
Shane: After reading your book I got really excited because it’s very fairy-tale land, weird, new, and a major press is publishing it. How did it come about that Penguin accepted it? Were you surprised?
Ben: Well, maybe it’s strange, but I don’t think of my stories as weird. I mean, they’re classically structured and very straightforward. In my mind, they’re a mix between Aesop’s fables and The Twilight Zone; I’ve always seen them as a very mainstream thing. The new stories I’ve been writing, the first-person ones, I think are much, much weirder. But for some reason they seem to be read as more “normal.” I haven’t yet been able to make sense of the whole thing.