Big Ray
“Big Ray is a disgusting man and a great character. He’s dead at the start of the novel, and it’s impossible not to wish him deader. … Mr. Kimball is not one to flinch, and this portrayal is the better for it.”
“Gorgeous”
-- Oprah.com
“Distilled, intense … Fear and revulsion mingle with a
kind of helpless love.”
[Big
Ray is]
“astonishingly moving … to mesmerizing effect. …
Big Ray
is an appalling tale told
with anger, dark humor and surprising tenderness.”
“In his novel BIG RAY, Kimball offers a complex and
graceful peek at one man’s grieving process: It’s a
eulogy, a tribute, an indictment, and a painfully
truthful examination of fathers and sons.”
-- Los Angeles Times, Jacket
Copy
“Stunning … gripping … fascinating”
-- BBC Radio 4
“Despite his disturbing material, Kimball manages his
narrative with a dark humor, as well as stirring empathy.
Big Ray is an ogre, yes but a multi-faceted one -- and
most poignantly, a father whose son continues to yearn
for his love.”
“Paperback of the Week: … in this sparingly written
document, which pares back all extraneous detail to get
at the emotional core, there’s a striking degree of
honesty, which Kimball/Carrier tries to present almost
casually as though he weren’t deeply troubled but just
thinking things through. It is, above all, a convincing
depiction of a man trying to work through conflicting
emotions.”
-- The Herald
“It is rare for obesity to be tackled this directly in
literature and Kimball is ahead of the pack with this
intimate account … Kimball’s delicately layered account
of Daniel’s efforts to connect with his dad builds to a
whole that is intensely moving.”
“One of ‘The Ten Best Books of 2012’”
-- L Magazine
“Emotional and yet funny.”
“This plainspoken novel about a man coming to terms with
his abusive father’s death sneaks up on you--and is
unlike anything else you’ve read.”
-- Reader’s Digest
“Prepare to be utterly punished.”
-- Vice
MK talks about obesity in fiction on BBC Radio 4’s
Open Book.
“Novels like Michael Kimball’s Big Ray reveal that corpulence has become a
go-to metaphor for emotional unrest.”
-- Salon
“Psychologically acute, Michael
Kimball’s narrative is … both ingenious and painfully
funny, as well as deeply moving.”
-- Daily Mail
“Together, the fragments form a surprisingly enthralling
portrait of an abusive father … a spellbinding and
unflinching meditation on forgiveness, a novel that
secures Kimball’s reputation as a literary innovator.”
“Michael Kimball has been writing
innovative, compelling and beautifully felt books for
years, but Big
Ray seems a
break-through and culmination all at once. It's funny and
terrifying and it's his masterpiece, at least so far.”
-- Sam Lipsyte
“An uncompromising work of power and grace. I finished
reading it a week ago, but I still can't put it down."
-- Jon McGregor
“Reading Big
Ray is like
hearing a close friend processing some serious loss.
Michael Kimball does emotional immediacy better than any
writer alive, I shit you not.”
-- HTMLGIANT
“Dude can write.”
-- HTMLGIANT
“There aren’t many characters as big as Big Ray in modern
fiction.”
-- Los Angeles Review of
Books
“Big
Ray is a great
novel, a small books that happens to be about the idea of
bigness. … Measured sentences come one after another,
like ticking time bombs. … Kimball’s prose is so
luminously clear that each new paragraph seems like
another piece of evidence in the case for and against Big
Ray. … I finished it feeling shaken. In this small book
Kimball has captured the terrible contradictions of life
as it’s lived.”
“Michael Kimball’s Big Ray is a powerfully intimate and sorrowful
work, a novel that will forever mark your consciousness
with its indelible and heartfelt beauty."
excerpt of Big Ray @ Vice
MK’s article about
the underrepresentation of overweight characters @
Huffington Post
“Big Ray
has an honesty and a forthrightness of approach … which
serve to establish … an intense and personal connection,
like I feel in the best nonfiction. But this isn’t
nonfiction. The ambition on display in Kimball’s book is
pretty clearly novelistic. His subjects are big ones.”
“Michael Kimball gained a devoted following with three
brilliant novels (Us, Dear
Everybody,
and The Way the
Family Got Away), all of which deal honestly and
unconventionally with loss. His latest work,
Big
Ray, is his
most powerful: A propulsive first-person narrative by a
man mourning his abusive and obese (over 500 pounds)
father’s death.
“In the novel Big Ray, Michael Kimball uses the phrase ‘my
father’ over eight hundred times. … “Michael Kimball uses
that phrase so many times it begins to weigh on you … The
father is unbearable.”
“I have a lot of feelings for Michael Kimball … Kimball’s
prose traipses between intimacy and detachment. The novel
adopts a kind of first-person omniscience that
intensifies the reality of the narrator’s complicated
grief for the death of his father, without sacrificing
any heart. … humans often need the comic to understand
the tragic. Kimball just has the balls to do it with Fat
Father jokes.”
MK and Brad Listi talk about polar bears, the ocean,
eating a burrito, and a fear of finishing @
Other People.
“Hinged on the border between love and hate, between
redemption and condemnation, Big Ray is a tremendously beautiful novel that
tackles death and obesity and child abuse and forgiveness
from a strikingly new perspective. … an enormously
powerful examination of truth and love and cowardice and
courage between a father and a son.”
“Both humorous and heartbreaking, it has gained a
permanent place on my bookshelf. … It’s a book to return
to again and again … for life.”
-- Bookseller
[Big
Ray] “packs the
emotional charge of a lifetime.”
-- Booklist
From an interview @ The Nervous Breakdown: “Big Ray is Michael’s … most intimate and
moving … You can’t help but be somewhat changed after
reading this book.”
From an interview @ Charlotte Viewpoint: “This deeply affecting novel”
"The book reads like a memoir, the
entirely believable product of a son grappling with the
death and life of his father. The narrator talks frankly
of his estrangement and efforts to connect, the abuse he
suffered and his mixed feelings; the obituary, he notes,
listed those who preceded Ray in death and those who
survived him. 'I’m one of the people who survived.'”
From an interview @ Vice: “Somehow [Big Ray] manages to be simultaneously
Kimball’s most brutal and heartfelt and blackly
hilarious book yet.”
“Big
Ray is a
lovely, very melancholy book, and one that leaves an
imprint in the mind just like Big Ray’s on that armchair
[on the cover]. ”
-- Big Other
“Big
Ray is a novel
that has the feel and authenticity of a memoir.”
“The compelling nature of the character
is never in doubt. Big Ray crashes through the 182 pages
of this slim volume, pushing everything else to the side
to make way for his bulk. One week later, this reviewer
was still having nightmares about him.”
“Kimball’s story takes on something of
a redemptive, Job-like intensity. … it is a well-told
story that is not easy to forget.”
-- Shelf
Awareness
“elegantly straightforward”
-- Library Journal
“arresting”
-- Full Stop
“The most impressive feat of Kimball is his ability to do
two things at once, all the time … funny and sad …
hateful and reassuring.”
-- JMWW
In Big
Ray, Kimball
writes “with a previously untapped range of emotion and
intimacy."
“Big Ray’s
power is unquestionable.”
“When I finished Big Ray, I was thankful for the dad I have. …
Be prepared to have your heart broken. You will love
every second of it.”
”Overwhelming … In Big Ray, Michael Kimball has accomplished
something astonish. In seeking to explain how love and
hate can exist at once, he’s given us the experience of
loving and hating. … You’ll both love and hate him for
it.”
“Fall head over heels for Michael
Kimball’s Big
Ray."
Big Ray is
"part eulogy, part psychological retaliation, and an
entirely devastating whole."
-- Urbanite
“I was astounded by the level of truth
and emotion that are in every page of Big Ray.”
Big Ray: Best Cover of the Month @
Vice
Us
"The best little novel you haven't heard about,
Us
... Kimball's clear-eyed
prose unlocks the most vulnerable voice ... creating an
emotional link that leaves no reader untouched."
5 Stars: "The sentences and even
paragraphs simulate the stunned but dutiful response to
the suffering of a loved one: short, raw and somewhat
elliptical, wrapping themselves around the small tasks at
hand and the larger questions constantly raised. ...
Kimball’s short chapters cast such a hypnotic spell, the
reader is able to plug directly into the character’s
grief. It’s a simply gorgeous and astonishing book, the
kind that makes the outside world disappear once you open
its pages."
“Michael Kimball’s Us is heartbreakingly lovely ... the
writing’s a pleasure, and sometimes you just need to read
something with weight.”
“Be forewarned: when you pick up
Us, Michael Kimball's haunting story of
love and letting go, you will not be able to put it
down.”
"Your book, Michael Kimball, is the
book I wish I could write. Your book is the book I wish
every book could be. It is reification. It is haptic. It
is ecstatic. Thank you, Michael Kimball, for
Us."
-- Lily Hoang’s “A letter to Michael
Kimball” @ HTMLGiant
"Kimball is an amazingly empathetic
writer."
[Us is] "incredibly raw and unabashedly
real ... Kimball wins us over by his impressive emotional
authenticity. Us is so authentic that one might mistake
it for an autobiography."
-- Rain Taxi
"brilliantly written and heartbreaking
in all the best ways"
"this examination of love, grief and
family makes these universal themes seem achingly fresh.
... Us delivers a powerful emotional
experience."
"A Breathless Humanity":
Us
is "bold and generous. Its
greatest strength is the sensitivity with which Kimball
explores the complexities of understanding pain and
watching someone you love die. Us is a book that evocatively renders the
static of sadness into a breathless humanity."
A Top 10 Best Literary Love
Story: "The
story chronicles a relationship that is both
bludgeoning in its sheer devastation and yet
remarkably–exquisitely–beautiful ... a must read."
--The Best Damn Creative Writing
Blog
"One of the saddest [books], and most
compelling, ... is Michael Kimball’s gutting new
novel, Us ... We consumed the entire book in one
subway ride, and got more than a few strange glances our
way as Kimball’s novel caused us to convulse with sobs."
-- Flavorpill
Michael’s friend and genius Adam
Robinson interviewed him about Us for Bomb. Adam asks Michael some impossible
questions and Michael tells him what he'd be doing if
he wasn't writing novels.
Book Page has named its Top 10 Indie Picks for
2011 and Us tops the list
City
Paper named Us to its Top Ten list for The Year in
Books
"As entertaining as it is intelligent as it is
irreverent, Kimball’s prose is that rare creature that
devours while being devoured."
"One of my favorite books of the year"
"We’re all familiar with the classic
boy-meets-girl scenario, but what would happen if the
tale kept going? Kimball takes the reader to the end of
the love story—the real end—and shows just how crushing
it can be. "
-- City Paper
"The novel is heartbreaking, crushing
... powerfully so. It's the good kind of crushing, too."
An interview with Michael about
Us, Dear
Everybody,
sadness and reckoning, euphoria and writing, and writing
as something that is rendered @ Used
Furniture
A
five-question, one-minute interview at
Birdsong.
"I’ve
read review after review of this amazing book that turns
back on itself and becomes a sort of self-examination by
the reviewer. I think that says more about the brilliance
of Kimball’s novel than it does about us readers ...
Michael Kimball’s wonderful book ... it fastened itself
around my neck as I read, got in my eyes, swam in my
bloodstream, infected my brain. The book made it happen.
Us became a story about my grandfather, about my husband,
about the people I love and the loss I fear."
-- Amber Sparks, Big Other
"... disarmingly simple, gorgeously
structured, and as achingly sad a book as I have ever
read. I had to stop a couple of times. I really did. The
book’s elderly couple—so painfully aware of the fact that
one of them is living the last parts of her life—are
drawn so concisely, and the situation is so precisely
rendered, it was hard not to spend all my time living in
it even when I wasn’t reading the book."
-- Matthew Simmons, HTMLGIANT
Us is "tightly written, unflinchingly
direct, and achingly beautiful." "The prose is as clean
as a surgical incision and Kimball dives directly into
the dark waters of love and mortality that most writers
only dip their toes into. This is a book you should be
reading."
"a literary gem"
-- LitCh@t
"Michael Kimball is a rare, rare
writer, a writer whose empathy knows no limits. He holds
the note of loss and his voice never cracks."
-- Outsider Writers
Collective
"Kimball wonderfully balances gravity
with brevity. That he can pack such an emotional
experience into such a small space speaks to his talents,
both as a mature authority on relationships and as a
craftsman of tight, effective prose. ... Each moment the
husband gets to share with his wife becomes a beautiful
extension of their time together on earth. ... leaves the
reader absolutely floored"
"Michael Kimball faces mortality
directly, confronting the passionate life in the most
poetic sentences I’ve read from a fiction writer in a
long time. And by poetic, I don’t mean that the prose is
prettified with a lot of adjectives and fancy syntactical
flourishes. It is poetic in the sense that the sentences
seem made, hewn, created by a mind and hand that love the
way we think and talk in sentences. ... After having
finished one of the saddest books I’ll probably ever
read, I was filled with a strange exuberance. ... If
death is a sentence, Michael Kimball has found its
words."
"Michael Kimball's stylistic capacities
dwarf those of most contemporary fiction writers."
-- Room 220
An interview with Michael about
compression, beautiful documentaries, and the reputation
of The Tyrant @ Creative
Loafing
"I sat down with the book and didn’t get up until I
finished without realizing that any time had passed. ...
The man’s story is heart-wrenching and he holds onto you
without letting go, not that you would ever want him to."
-- New Pages
Michael is "the writer you've been
dreaming of"
"Kimball's naked prose magnifies the
poignancy of the situation ... Us is a reminder that we are all tragedies
waiting to happen. It makes you aware of the fragility of
your own heart, of the dull ache it often carries. Some
readers may find Us depressing, but with its awareness
comes a gem of appreciation for the life you currently
lead, even with its eventual demise. This book shines a
laser beam into the deep, dark places in the human soul,
and renders them oddly transparent."
-- Urbanite
"There is this gentility and softness
and purity that becomes some kind of being, and this
being, by the end of the book, is us. ... There is a gap
here in what is actually happening and what is going on
in the narrator's head, and it is in this gap where the
sadness and the love exist."
"Us is such strange magic ...
Us
brings up something strange
and terrifying to consider ... [about] the real beauty
and magic of being alive ... It's a gorgeous book."
"5 Stars ... Michael Kimball has blown
me away with his upcoming release Us -- a beautiful, heart-wrenching novel"
“such a painful softness”: "Michael
Kimball’s Us is, as much as we may not want to admit
it, the story of all of us and what we daily attempt to
ignore: that eventually our loved ones, our spouses and
significant relations, will either die and leave us or we
will die and leave them."
-- Red Fez
"Us might break your heart, but it's a good
kind of break-- the kind that reminds you how nice it is
to be alive."
"a devastatingly beautiful portrait of
a human being losing the person who matters to him most"
"I even walked to and from school in
order to keep reading the novel." "Us moves you, rattles you, and shakes your
spirit as a human ... read this magnificent novel."
"an unflinching account." "Kimball
takes many risks in Us and ... the risks pay off, leading to a
conclusion that is as surprising as it is inevitable, and
deeply satisfying."
-- Chamber Four
NPR's Madeleine Brand interviews Michael about
Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on
a postcard) for All Things
Considered.
Listen to the interview, read about the project, and
watch the slideshow build-out.
Dear
Everybody is a
"curatorial masterpiece"
-- The Believer
Dear Everybody
is now available as
an ebook.
The Way
the Family Got Away is now available as an
ebook.
"60 Writers/60 Places
is a wonderful example
of literary thinking becoming a visual language." Both
"I Will Smash You" and "60 Writers" are "disarmingly engaging" and
both films "subtly acc[rue] an emotive force."
-- Bret McCabe, City Paper
Michael featured in Poets &
Writers: Suzanne Pettypiece's profile
"Beyond Words" about
writers who practice other arts. There's a two-page+
interview where Michael talks about painting.
Dear
Everybody is
named one of the "25 Important Books of the 00s"
at HTMLGIANT
Dear Everybody is on Flavorwire's
Ultimate Hipster Reading
List
"Dear
Everybody is
one of the finest, most heartbreaking books I’ve ever
read ... Kimball writes his characters with a tenderness
that moves me profoundly ... The complexity in
Dear
Everybody builds subtly, but by the end of the
book the immensity of the story that has been told is
staggering."
--Roxane Gay, HTMLGIANT
"I know of no one ... who knows and
understands every cog and flywheel and screw of the
language machine to the degree of Kimball's reach."
Dear Everybody
is "forever embedded in my
brain"
-- John Madera, Word Riot
I WILL SMASH
YOU: "Kimball and Dipierro have put
together a collection of money shots that make you
care about who's coming and why."
-- Bret McCabe, City Paper
"Dear Everybody
... touches the heart of
hearts ... snowflake-like letters ... exquisite ... the
innermost feelings of real feeling ... "
Michael Kimball "is already delivering
the future of the novel." He is "one of the authentic
innovators in contemporary fiction," who should be
compared to Raymond Carver and Italo Calvino, and his
writing "sings the most intimate tragedies of the Great
American Family."
-- Mauricio Montiel Figueiras,
Letras
Libres
"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
Best of
Baltimore: Michael is City
Paper's Best Literary Agent of
Change
"I don’t always say this, so I hope you will indulge me:
Read Dear
Everybody. It
is a work of literary inventiveness and great
compassion."
-- Bethanne Patrick,
WETA's The Book
Studio
"elegantly and eloquently written ...
It's an unforgettable book ... I highly recommend it"
-- Anne Stinson, The
Star-Democrat
"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
"Human Destiny Starkly Illuminated"
-- Rupert Wondolowski,
City Paper
"A wonderful, clever, imaginative and
moving book. It really is quite something ... a fucking
marvelous book."
-- Scott Pack, Me and My Big
Mouth
Susan Tomaselli conducts an extended, collage-like
interview with Michael in Dogmatika
"stunning...Kimball has crafted an unconventional
masterpiece"
-- Citizen Dick
349 Pieces: On Writing
Dear Everybody
in The View From
Here
An interview at Apostrophe Cast
in which Michael answers
whether he ever had a crush on a literary celebrity
"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"
"the novel is spot on. It amazes me
that a writer can build suspense in a story where we
already know the ending. It’s kind of awesome. In fact, I
enjoyed this book so much I did something I never do. I
wrote the author a fan letter."
-- Jodi Chromey, Minnesota
Reads
"Dear Everybody
is about a weatherman who
commits suicide, and it is heart-achingly good."
--Matthew Simmons, Hobart
Michael named "International King of Postcards"
at HTMLGIANT
An interview at Hobart
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"
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 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
"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
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
"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."
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
Review Excerpts for
the UK edition of Us
"It’s
easy to see why Kimball is held up as one of the
potentially great literary hopes of recent times."
--Book Munch
"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
"A deep love between an ageing husband and wife is given
a heartbreaking voice in Michael Kimball’s second
novel, [Us]. … 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
"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
"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
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
"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
"An extraordinary novel"
--The Times
Metro
"A bleak, powerful and extraordinary debut"
--The Book
Seller
"Kimball has created a short novel with long echoes, an
epitaph of economics."
--The
Stranger
"The feelings inspired by Kimball's first novel are hard
to shake, like a continuous, terrifying, fever-induced
nightmare."
--City Link
"Michael Kimball breathes life into
American experimental fiction in this moving debut
novel."
"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)