Of This World — Benjamin Kessler

$20.00

Something’s different. Can you feel it?

In these seventeen stories, author Benjamin Kessler explores both the familiar and alien of the everyday. This debut collection asks not only what it means to change, but how to navigate life after emerging on the other side.

Featuring an alien abduction, a botched bank robbery, and a man compelled to eat nothing but batteries, each story seeks to make sense of what it means to be human, if such a thing is even possible.  

Something’s different. Can you feel it?

In these seventeen stories, author Benjamin Kessler explores both the familiar and alien of the everyday. This debut collection asks not only what it means to change, but how to navigate life after emerging on the other side.

Featuring an alien abduction, a botched bank robbery, and a man compelled to eat nothing but batteries, each story seeks to make sense of what it means to be human, if such a thing is even possible.  

Praise for Of This World 

Benjamin Kessler’s Of This World is a terrific collection. Its stories are compact, powerful, and often deeply strange—reflecting, in precise, evocative prose, the ever-more-surreal world in which we find ourselves living. A mesmerizing journey from first story to last.  

—Christopher Coake, author of You Would Have Told Me Not To  

The stories in Of This World are so funny and unexpected, inhabited by strikingly different and memorable characters. Kessler has a gift for capturing fleeting, vivid moments that indelibly reveal a character’s deepest fears or desires in a flash. What I love most is how these stories portray contradictory feelings in a single character or relationship—sadness and absurdity, love and loneliness—often at the same time. This is a lively, entertaining story collection that will stay with you.  

—Gabriel Urza, author of All That Followed and The White Death: An Illusion

About the Author

Benjamin Kessler's work appears in Bellevue Literary Review, DIAGRAM, Entropy, Hobart, and Pithead Chapel, among others. Raised in northern Colorado, he now lives, writes, and frequently thrifts in Portland, Oregon.