We spend much of our lives searching for connection.

Friendships. Family. Romance. Community. We want to know that someone sees us, understands us, and is glad we’re here. Yet after enough disappointment or heartbreak, something curious can happen. Solitude begins to feel safer than closeness, and the walls we built to protect ourselves become increasingly difficult to tear down.

The tension between isolation and connection has fascinated writers for centuries because it asks a difficult question: Are we alone because no one understands us, or because we have slowly learned to keep everyone at a distance?

Benjamin Talbot explores that question in remarkable and often surprising ways in Periscope City.

Rather than telling a single story, Talbot invites readers into a collection of interconnected tales set in a city unlike any other. Periscope City is inhabited by people who have grown accustomed to emotional distance. Love has become transactional. Human connection is fleeting. The city’s residents are united by a shared paradox: they long for intimacy while fearing everything it demands.

What makes Periscope City especially memorable is its ability to feel both unfamiliar and recognizable at the same time. Its imagined setting may be strange, but the emotions that drive its characters are anything but. Nearly everyone has experienced loneliness, regret, longing, or the temptation to retreat from the vulnerability genuine relationships require. Talbot simply pushes those feelings to their logical extreme, creating a world that reflects our own back to us in unexpected ways.

Critics have praised the collection for its originality and emotional depth. Kirkus Reviews called it “a captivating series of short stories, both dramatically and philosophically enthralling,” while Midwest Book Review observed that Talbot “excels at depicting a world both alien and familiar at the same time.”

The stories that stay with us are rarely those that offer easy answers. They are the ones that quietly ask us to examine ourselves.

Periscope City does exactly that. Long after the final story ends, readers may find themselves wondering not only about the people who inhabit Talbot’s extraordinary city, but about the invisible walls we sometimes build in our own lives.

If you enjoy literary fiction that is imaginative, emotionally resonant, and unafraid to ask difficult questions, Periscope City is a collection well worth exploring.

Periscope City

A sign greeted me at the border: Periscope City: Where The Lonely Go To Live Alone.

It spoke my language, so I crossed in by foot, to the nearest place it took me. That place was a one-story house with a long driveway, called The Institute. There they asked me dozens of questions, about my immediate past, and made me take a personality exam. I told them the truth: that I was a thirty-four-year-old loner whose friends had deserted him for marriage or death. They set me up in the Cramden Hotel.

During the first week, I spoke with housekeeping and the concierge only. They were all automatons. It was the best the town could do to live up to its tagline.

---

Although I loved loneliness, I was still lonely as hell. After months of wallowing about my life situation, sinking into the lack of fellow humans, I wanted to mix it up. I thought being lonely among automatons was a different lonely as being lonely among humans. I needed to scratch that itch.

The concierge suggested a dating app called Loner, and the concierge said it had the best reputation for keeping the lonesome lonely.

I filled out a profile and submitted it to the AI gods for review. It matched me with Raylene, a blonde Puerto Rican who stood over six feet. Her profile said very little about her beyond the fact that she’d moved from Buffalo, New York and loved pets over people. In her picture, she sat on a snowy park bench and wore a fleece jacket. A French bulldog sat in her lap, and it wore a black-and-white dog poncho. It looked like a staged photo, like something in an L.L. Bean catalog, but where L.L. Bean was trying to pull-off cozy, it was a cold, plastic, disconnected photo. I assumed her entire profile was an attempt at sarcasm.

Do you want to meet or not? she wrote.

Because of my lust for tall women, I wrote her back: Yes.

I have tickets to The Late Show, she wrote. Meet me at Geraldine Park at eight. I’ll be at the corner of Alaska and Winter Bear. And don’t be awkward.

---

When I showed up, Raylene was sitting on a snowy park bench in the same jacket as her photo, with her service bulldog in her lap. The dog even wore the black-and-white poncho. Raylene’s smile was all the picture was missing.

“Joe?” she asked.

Her perfume was cedar, or maybe it was the trees. Whatever the case, the scent had found its way to me, and it smelled lovely. The Loner profile was missing a smell.

“Raylene?”

“No,” she said. “Of course it is. How would I know your name was Joe?”

The bulldog barked.

“Sheepshead, knock it off,” she said.

Sheepshead? After Raylene fed her a pill the dog calmed down. The pill must’ve been a fast-acting depressant, which they sold over the counter here in Periscope City. I know because of my own dog, but he didn’t need medication. I did.

“You look different from your picture,” she said.

Ditto. Not only did she frown but her hair wasn’t blonde. It was purple.

“How so?” I said.

“I thought you were taller,” she said.

I ignored her comment (let’s call it an insult), already being my tallest.

“Ask me something,” she said.

~From the story, “Periscope City,” from the book, Periscope City, by Benjamin Talbot~