"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."
An interview at
Lucy
Magazine
"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
a "grim, gripping book for
fall": "oddly profound and at times
profoundly banal"
Michael named "International King of Postcards"
at HTMLGIANT
An interview at 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
Michael's Word reading a
TIme Out New York
"Critic's Pick": "Kimball’s
book, Dear Everybody, is a truly moving and often
hilarious epistolary novel"
"Human Destiny Starkly Illuminated"
-- Rupert Wondolowski,
City Paper
Michael's KGB reading a NY
Magazine "Editors' Recommendation"
"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."
"The Page 99 Test" for
Dear Everybody
"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 has written a book of
beauty. It's a sad book and a wonderful one, and one that
made me cry."
-- Joseph Young,
JMWW
Michael's radio interview on
City Pulse on the Air
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
Michael's Lit Crawl reading a
Time Out New York
"Critic's Pick"
Michael reads from
Dear Everybody on WYPR's The
Signal
Michael is an Indie Heartthrob at
Bookslut
An interview in Word Riot
An interview in the Sunday print & online editions of
The Baltimore Sun
Featured Author at Keyhole Magazine
-- an interview with Jonathan Bergey
& a conversation about "Feeling and Fiction"
with Karen Lillis
"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
Playlist for Dear
Everybody at Largehearted Boy's
Book Notes
"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."
A profile of Michael in
The Examiner by Rafael
Alvarez
An
interview in The Urbanite Magazine
"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
Review Excerpts
for How Much of Us There
Was
"It’s easy to
see why Kimball is held up as one of the potentially great
literary hopes of recent times."
--Book Munch, Chris Pickering
"Kimball has created something rare and brave in his second
novel: the voice of an elderly man watching a beloved life
slip away and with it the entire meaning of his own
existence. … [It is a] beautifully tuned, near perfect
account of a very ordinary death."
--Metro London, Claire Allfree
"A deep love between an ageing husband and wife is given a
heartbreaking voice in Michael Kimball’s second novel, How
Much of Us There Was. … Told through the eyes of the husband,
the story is tender and poignant. His despair moves us
because it is neither fantastic nor indulgent."
--Time Out London, Mariko Kato
"Not only does he address mortality head-on, but his narrator
describes the deep and powerful love between his grandparents
as his grandfather quietly and desperately watches his wife
slowly dying. The grandfather’s narration is powerful and
moving … uncomprehending and breathless."
--The Observer, Rebecca Seal
"This is the saddest book I have ever read and one of the
most beautiful and unusual. A very old man wakes up in the
night to find his equally-aged wife has had a stroke. Then
follows a minute-to-minute account of what happens in the
hospital and finally, his tender care for her back in their
own home. One can't help being aware of his grief and the
great love he feels for his dying wife. It will make you cry
and break your heart but this is one book you must read.
Fewer than 200 pages but it says all."
--Telegraph and
Argus, Betty
Williams
Review Excerpts
for The Way the Family
Got Away
"Kimball's first novel ... is moving and clever: the open
road, so long a symbol of freedom and self-discovery in
American fiction, is here rendered as denuded of promise,
embodying desertion, desolation and rootlessness. ...
Kimball's novel reads as parable about the death of the
family, of how impossible family life is in a numbedly
materialistic society. However, the largeness of the message
should not detract from the intricacy of fine, precise
storytelling ... he has taken it [American literature]
somewhere very dark and unsettling."
--The Times, Tim Teeman, "Highway to the Heart of
America"
"Occasionally a novel by a new writer will cause critics to
choke with excitement. This is one. ... Kimball resembles a
skinhead at a cocktail party—no quarter given to poxy
commercialism. For that reason alone, his achievement is
admirable. He ignores the media's liason with trends, fame,
success, and trivia."
--The Scotsman, Angus Wolfe Murray
"An extraordinary novel"
--The Times Metro, Tarek Modi
"A bleak, powerful and extraordinary debut"
--The Book Seller
"Kimball has created a short novel with long echoes,
an epitaph of economics."
--The Stranger, Traci Vogel
"The feelings inspired by Kimball's first novel are hard to
shake, like a continuous, terrifying, fever-induced
nightmare."
--City Link, Colleen Dougher
"You'll come away thinking you’ve shared time with someone
who’ll be on shelves for many years to come."
--RTÉ (Irish Public Broadcasting), Harry Guerin