Description
In the stories that make up Together, Apart, the heroes aren’t very heroic. They are flawed. Failures. They are people figuring out how to grieve when their losses should feel more like relief: a teenage boy who loses the egg he was supposed to care for like a child, a mother whose son can’t find happiness in a strange book. But this collection is not just about failure—it’s about resilience. Ben Hoffman writes with unwavering compassion, from the many ex-wives of a recently deceased father to the brothers who listen to their parents fighting in a hotel, hoping instead to hear some sound, some sign of love. Put your ear to any of these stories and you’ll hear it.
“A fine combination of smart, funny, and moving, and of long and short work—I thought it had a lot of variety while still feeling cohesive as a chapbook. And it’s the one that I found myself continuously coming back to.”
—Matt Bell, judge of our 2012 contest and author of In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods
“Ben Hoffman’s stories are fantastic, funny, feverish, and in love with language. The conclusions they reach are genuine ideas and they float into the reader’s mind so beautifully, so full of a certain kind of intelligent life.”
—Rebecca Lee, author of Bobcat
Reviews:
Heavy Feather Review: “Hoffman’s fiction is one of cruelty and trauma, loss and pain, desperate attempts at redemption. Neither heroes nor villains, his characters live in that purgatorial and immeasurably more believable space between good and bad, ecstatic and despondent. A space between ‘together’ and ‘apart.’”
The Master’s Review: “The prose is by turns funny and sad. The narrators are cynical, then kind. The characters are constantly grappling with the difference between their desires and the realities they are presented with. It is in this impossible, transitional space that Hoffman’s stories flourish.”
Ben Hoffman’s fiction has won the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award and been published by American Short Fiction, Granta, Lightspeed, The Missouri Review, Zoetrope, and others. His stories have been named among the Notable/ Distinguished Stories of the Year in the Pushcart Prize, Best American Non-Required Reading, and Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy anthologies. He has received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, where he was the 2014-2015 Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellow, Stanford University, where he was a 2015-2017 Wallace Stegner Fellow, and the National Endowment for the Arts, where he is a 2020 Literature Fellow. Originally from Pennsylvania, he lives in Chicago with his wife, son, and dogs and is at work on a novel.
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