Ben Pester's 'Sail Away Land' Explores Abandonment and Work Culture

Ben Pester's new short story collection 'Sail Away Land' (Granta Books) follows his novel 'The Expansion Project' from last summer. The collection retains corporate paranoia in its first and last stories, 'Around the Time of My Promotion' and 'Exit Interview for a Valued Colleague', which explore psyche through work meetings. Other stories range from a dinner party to a surreal stepfather scenario. Pester's dream-like prose untethers familiar spaces. In an interview with Valeria Berghinz, Pester discusses his writing process, noting that short stories allow bursts of focus over weeks. He emphasizes voice as crucial, with narrators having their own cadence. The theme of being left behind recurs throughout, countering the traditional monomyth of departure and growth. Pester explains that every journey creates an untold story of abandonment. The title story came from his daughter's phrase for where she went when falling asleep. Pester also addresses self-aware narrators, including one named Ben Pester, which he sees as honesty. He has already turned in his next novel, but notes that his published work represents a fraction of his long writing career.