by Agatha French

From: Los Angeles Times

There was a time when Ben Loory lived at night.

That’s how he puts it, as if night isn’t a stretch of empty hours to endure, but a place to enter, to discover whole worlds inside. After dark, the grocery stores are empty and the streets are quiet and still. The city at night is a city through the looking glass, perfect for writing, as Loory does, short stories so imaginative — and yet so perplexingly familiar — they could have formed in a dream.

“I used to wake up at 5 in the afternoon and stay up all night and write,” he said. “I still want to live at night; I just can’t really do it anymore.” Sipping a late morning instant coffee in the living room of his sunny Echo Park home, Loory’s demeanor is gentle, his voice sometimes so quiet that a plane overhead, or a neighbor’s conversation carrying through the open window, threatened to drown it out. Piles of books covered the kitchen table and a rainbow-paned quilt, hand-made by a friend, splashed across the bed. “At night, you’re just a lot lonelier,” he added, “which makes it easier to write stories about people with problems. In the daytime, everything seems fine.”

“People,” when it comes to Loory’s work, is a loose term. In “Tales of Falling and Flying,” his second collection of short stories, it may actually be a squid who’s falling in love or a dodo reckoning with identity, but the concerns and conflicts that needle these unusual protagonists are deeply recognizable: longing, belonging, connection, loss. “The things that happen in them always seem unexpected to me, but the premises don’t seem particularly out there,” he said of his stories, and yet “if there was an animated version of ‘The Twilight Zone,’ that’s what I’m doing.” His imagination is clearly rife and whirring: At one point, he referred to selling “this book to the penguins” (he is published by Penguin Originals) as if a flock of Arctic birds sits marking up manuscripts behind Manhattan desks. Read Rest of Article Here