Ben Loory is the author of the collection Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day and a picture book for children, The Baseball Player and the Walrus. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, READ Magazine, and Fairy Tale Review; been heard on This American Life and Selected Shorts; performed live at WordTheatre in Los Angeles and London; and translated into many languages, including Japanese, Farsi, Arabic, and Indonesian. A graduate of Harvard and the American Film Institute, Loory lives in Los Angeles, where he is an Instructor for the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program.
Tales of Falling and Flying by Ben Loory
Ben Loory’s collection Tales of Falling and Flying (2017) falls into that category of “just not for me” books, meaning this will be a relatively brief take on the collection. It’s the sort of writing where I can see where some people would enjoy it, can note the author’s talent, can acknowledge the wit and bright originality, but overall it just doesn’t do it for me. In this case, it begins with my being a tough audience for short stories, as I tend to prefer full, rich immersion in story and character — aspects too often lacking in most stories I’ve found. Loory’s tales double-down on this as they’re all pretty short, not quite Lydia Davis short but nearly: almost 40 stories in just over 200 pages. So it’s basically in and out and on to the next.
That’s not to say some of these stories don’t have concepts or endi... Read More
