I’M A RETIRED professor of English, so I am sometimes asked whether there I have recommendations of young/new/emerging fiction writers. I always mention Bennett Sims (as I always mentioned Ben Marcus thirty years ago and Joshua Cohen fifteen years ago). Not that many people have taken up my recommendation, but one day, they will wish they had.
Other Minds and Other Stories is Sims’s second collection and is just as strong as his first, White Dialogues. The title story is explicitly about the famous philosophical question of how we know what other people are thinking (and whether we can tell that they are indeed thinking—that too is part of the question). The story follows the thoughts of someone in the tricky situation of composing an email to someone she is in the earliest stages of a relationship with as she guesses and re-guesses how her correspondent would feel about this word or that word, this tone or that tone.
The book’s other stories also engage the question in some way. For instance, the POV character in “An Introduction to the Reading of Hegel” is trying to anticipate the thoughts of the reviewers who will be evaluating the fellowship application he has but a few hours in which to complete. “A Postcard” is a detective story in a Paul Austen vein, in which the detective has to puzzle out the minds both of his client and of the man he is being paid to watch, who may turn out to be the same person.
I revere Jane Austen is part because of how well she represents the experiencing of the problem of other minds. Anne Elliot trying to read Capt. Wentworth’s mind in his words and actions, Elizabeth trying to read Darcy’s…it’s her trademark, almost. Sims is a different cup of coffee than Jane Austen, to be sure, but it’s interesting to see they share this particular skill.
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