his childhood friends and neighbors, the Tooth Fairy, his classmates and teachers, his psychiatrists, his ex-girlfriends and his ex-wife,
the state of Michigan, a television station, and a weather satellite. Taken together, these unsent letters tell the remarkable story of Jonathon’s life.
Dear
Everybody, the book
trailer
"In addition to writing stunning prose,
Kimball evocatively hints at entire physical and emotional
worlds lying just behind his story’s surface. In many cases,
the author’s verbal compression both amplifies and dampens
the tragic clamor of Jonathon’s letters ... they harbor such
a strange emotional power that you’ll find them hard to
forget."
--
Michael Miller, Time Out New
York
"There is a whole life contained
in this slim novel, a life as funny and warm and sad and
heartbreaking as any other, rendered with honest complexity
and freshness by Kimball's sharp writing."
-- Matt Bell,
Los Angeles
Times
"In this intimate epistolary
novel, a mentally ill weather man radiates crystalline
awareness and luminous delusion while his family and others
who knew him try to make sense of his tragic life. Both
gloomy and amusing, Kimball's flurry of short short stories
remind us of the necessity of communicating and the daunting
difficulty of truly connecting."
"very affecting, warm" and "wry
and funny and sweet"
-- Simon Appleby,
Bookgeeks
5 stars (out of 5): "beautifully
heartbreaking" and "a genuine discovery"
--Kathleen Wächter,
The Junction
"fantastic"
--Dan Wickett, EWN
"one of the hottest, most
innovative books of the year"
"Dear Everybody is about
a weatherman who commits suicide, and it is heart-achingly
good."
--Matthew Simmons,
Hobart
"Kimball does a superb job. ...
The picture that is drawn, though, is unutterably sad. It’s a
difficult read in places, but moving, more real and heartfelt
than many stories where authors cover up their discomfort by
giving their characters extravagant eccentricities."
-- Bruce Dennill,
The Citizen
a "grim, gripping book for
fall": "oddly profound and at times
profoundly banal"
"Human Destiny Starkly
Illuminated"
-- Rupert Wondolowski,
City Paper
"I’m giving this novel five out
of five, it was so dark (though not disturbing) yet touching,
I loved reading this novel and would recommend it to anyone."
"Dear Everybody is a
book both intricate and new, painful and engaging, tapping on
the clearest rendering of what is human, on the importance of
the rhythm of each word. Dear Everybody is so many
things--a collage, a hypnosis, an invention, a thing of awe,
perhaps a warning--a work of new that will no doubt linger in
your mind and in your stomach and in your aging skin for
quite some time."
-- Blake Butler,
Keyhole
Magazine
"Kimball has written a book of
beauty. It's a sad book and a wonderful one, and one that
made me cry."
-- Joseph Young,
JMWW
"Lightning has struck again with
this Baltimorean's book ... Kimball's protagonist possesses
an emotional clarity that makes his eventual suicide all the
more believable and tragic. ... You feel his pain."
-- John Lewis,
Baltimore
Magazine
"Each fragment drifts across the
page like a cumulous cloud and the cumulative effect of
Kimball's book is melancholy and elegiac and
amusing."
-- Susan McCallum-Smith,
WYPR
Kimball's "latest book could be a
breakout for him. ...his work is about death, and it has been
stripped down in the stark way it deserves."
-- Bill Castanier,
City
Pulse
"Dear Everybody is a
cleverly constructed book that balances pathos and humor
exquisitely, and proves Michael Kimball to be a master
storyteller."
-- David Gutowski,
Largehearted
Boy
“quite a literary feat … the character of
Jonathon Bender is stripped down to his emotional core.”
--
Gregg Wilhelm, WYPR
"Kimball writes with such deep emotion and
crafts his sentences with such mastery that he sweeps away
his own footprints and allows the reader unhindered access to
the story. The fragmented nature of the book makes it an
addictive read, giving the reader regular breaks while at the
same time drawing them along. I often found myself thinking,
'Just one more letter. One more diary entry. One more
interview,' until it was time to go back to the beginning and
start over. With Dear Everybody, Michael Kimball achieves the perfect
balance of form and content, comedy and tragedy – all without
sliding into melodrama or sentimentality, instead evoking
genuine emotion that will remain with readers far beyond the
last page."
--
Josh Maday, New Pages
"Dear Everybody is a
quick read, yet very interesting and true to life. This book
tells the tale of infidelity, mental illness, and the fact
that life is often hard to manage."
"Quirky, and idiosyncratic, this is a very
amusing novel that is oddly endearing, and conceals a warm
heart beneath its wit."
-- BooksQuarterly
Dear Everybody is "inventive and often extremely funny,
but it will also break your heart. Michael Kimball is one of
the most talented and original writers in America today. You
should read his books."
“One of the best reads
ever” -- R., Hey Josh
“A masterly written work of art” -- Ane Steenkamp,
Life After School
Advance Praise for
Dear
Everybody
“In
Bender’s unsent letters of apology or thanks, Michael Kimball
transforms the familiar into the strange again and the
simplest confessions are made moments of sublime wonder. Hold
on to this book.”
--
Christine Schutt, author of Florida
“Dear Everybody has the page-turning urgency of a mystery
and the thrilling formal inventiveness of the great
epistolary novels. Jonathon Bender's magical letters to the
world that never wrote to him are at once whimsical,
anguished, funny, utterly engaging and, finally,
unforgettable.”
--
Maud Casey, author of Genealogy
“Michael Kimball's wise-hearted epistolary
portrait of an endearingly honest, suicidal depressive is by
turns hilarious and haunting--and always thrillingly deep,
surprising, and pitch-perfect. Dear Everybody confirms Kimball's reputation as one of our
most supremely gifted and virtuosic renderers of the human
predicament. It's as moving a novel as I have read in years.”
--
Gary Lutz, author of Stories in the Worst Way
“I
love this book, love the strangely detailed world that
accumulates through letters, lists, yearbook quotes, and
psychological evaluations.
And I love the character of Jonathon Bender, the way he makes
me so sad and also makes me laugh so hard. He will stay with
me forever.”
--
Jessica Anya Blau, author of The Summer of Naked Swim
Parties
“Dear Michael Kimball: Thank you for this
book. What Jonathon Bender writes in his unsent letters are
what each of us longs to say, what all of us have been saying
our whole lives, just not out loud.”
--
Stephen Graham Jones, author of Demon Theory
“In
his third novel, Kimball gives us the singular life of
Jonathon Bender through a collage of different voices and
sources and in beautifully rendered sentences. He mercilessly
gives us a sense of the man and his trajectory, bringing us
painfully close to Bender himself. This is a compassionate
and compelling account of the quiet ways in which a life goes
wrong.”
--
Brian Evenson, author of The Open Curtain
