"These stories are brilliant: at once virtuosic and moving, funny and sad, terrifying and sweet. Each story is an excavation of thought, insistently pursued beyond the stopping point of most fiction, so that, in reading, we are permitted to sink into the deepest wormholes of its characters' minds. There we find language at its most intricate and precise, perfections of expression that provide a reader that thrilling sense of recognition that comes when the words on the page have caused her to see herself--and maybe others--more clearly than she had before she read them."
--Louisa Hall, author of Reproduction, Trinity, and Speak"[Sims is] kind of like if Alfred Hitchcock and Brian Evenson raised a baby with David Foster Wallace and Nicholson Baker. Sims should be a household name in horror."
--Carmen Maria Machado, LitHub"Anyone who admires such pyrotechnics of language will find 21st-century echoes of Edgar Allan Poe in Sims's portraits of paranoia and delusion, with their zodiacal narrowing and the maddening tungsten spin of their narratives."
--New York Times Book ReviewFrom the award-winning author of A Questionable Shape and White Dialogues, a brilliant, anxious, and hilarious new collection. A man lends his phone to a stranger in the mall, setting off an uncanny series of Unknown calls that come to haunt his relationship with jealousy and dread. A well-meaning locavore tries to butcher his backyard chickens humanely, only to find himself absorbed into the absurd violence of the pecking order. A student applying for a philosophy fellowship struggles to project himself into the thoughts of his hypothetical judges, becoming increasingly possessed and overpowered by the problem of other minds. And in "The Postcard," a private detective is hired to investigate a posthumous message that a widower has seemingly received from his dead wife, leading him into a foggy landscape of lost memories, shifting identities, and strange doublings. Cerebral and eerie, captivating and profound, these twelve stories expertly guide us through the paranoia and obsession of everyday horrors, not least the horrors of overthinking what other people might be thinking. With all of Sims's trademark virtuosity, innovation, and wit, Other Minds and Other Stories continues to expand the possibilities of conte