Ben Loory Books in Order

Ben Loory grew up in Dover, New Jersey, a small town northwest of New York City. Long before he published his compact, oddball tales, he was drawn to stories that could take a sharp turn and still feel emotionally true.

He studied Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University, then earned an MFA in screenwriting from the American Film Institute. For a time, he worked as a screenwriter in Los Angeles. That training stuck with him: his fiction often begins with a clear visual situation, moves quickly, and lets one strange idea carry the weight of the story.

Loory has said that some of his earliest short pieces felt a little like screenplay outlines. But the shorter form gave him room to follow ideas that would not fit neatly into a film: a talking television, an animal with an impossible problem, a person who walks into a dreamlike version of ordinary life.

The form fit.

His first collection, Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day, arrived in 2011. Its forty brief stories bring together people, monsters, trees, octopi, animals, and objects, all pushed around by fear, desire, loneliness, or love. A man may find a monster at the bottom of a swimming pool. A house and the sea may fall for each other. The language stays plain even when the situation gets very strange, which is part of the joke and part of the ache.

In 2015, Loory wrote The Baseball Player and the Walrus, a picture book illustrated by Alex Latimer. It follows a successful but unhappy ballplayer who adopts a walrus, then has to reckon with the real work of caring for a friend. It is a gentler book, but it still has Loory's fondness for a funny premise that opens into a question about connection and responsibility.

His second collection, Tales of Falling and Flying, followed in 2017. These stories range through lovesick squid, uncertain dodos, dragons, swordsmen, aliens, and people trying to make sense of one another. They are usually only a few pages long. Yet they leave space for comedy, tenderness, danger, and the kind of ending that feels both surprising and somehow inevitable.

The stories get in, make a strange turn, and get out.

Across his work, Loory returns to fable, myth, fairy tale, and dream logic without sounding like he is trying to recreate any of them. His characters are often unnamed or lightly sketched, so the emotional problem comes forward fast. A fear of being alone, a wish to escape, an awkward attraction, or a small act of cruelty can become the whole weather system of a story.

Loory's fiction has appeared widely in magazines and journals, and his work has also been heard in radio and live-performance settings. Some stories have been adapted for film, theater, music, and dance. He lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches short story writing and continues to work in the form that suits him best: short, direct tales with room for the impossible.