Award winning author Jacob Appel describes Home and Castle as “offering a window in the lives of men—middle class, middling and muddling—who find their livelihoods, status and families under threat. With a gift for capturing the subtleties of married life, and pains of lost social standing, Benz carves out a niche as a perceptive heir to the best of John Ohara and John Updike and Paula Fox. This is a major literary debut, one not to be missed." Here is a world where misunderstanding among friends, lovers, neighbors, and spouses runs rampant. A man who frequently gets mistaken for someone else decides to impersonate a stranger’s long lost classmate. A commuter falls asleep on the train and with time to kill, wanders into an unfamiliar bookstore where he meets a woman who may or may not be a former lover. An ordinary bureaucrat lucks into a fortune and retires early with unhappy social consequences. A couple moves to a gated community featuring archeological significance that’s a far cry from what they imagined. A wife’s job interview becomes a vehicle for reinterpretation of love and memory. A divorced father confronts ghosts of his past when he takes his daughter to Disneyland. A jealous husband makes an odd attempt at thwarting the interloper in his marriage. The characters in this volume try to keep their dreams afloat, as they reluctantly contend with the everyday skirmishes of modern life. More details may be found at www.snakenationpress.org, www.indielit.net., and www.facebook.com/ThomasBenzWriter.