Michael Kimball
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American Novelist
Contents |
[edit] Biography & Career
Michael Kimball (born February 1, 1967 in Lansing, MI) is the author of three novels: The Way the Family Got Away (2000), How Much of Us There Was (2005), and Dear Everybody (2008). Sam Lipsyte (author of Home Land, The Subject Steve, and Venus Drive) calls Kimball "a hero of contemporary fiction."
Kimball is a founding editor of Taint Magazine, and the recipient of a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a Boswell and Johnson Award, and the Lidano Fiction Prize. His short fiction has also appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Open City, Prairie Schooner, Post Road, and New York Tyrant. He studied at Michigan State University and New York University, and now lives in Baltimore, MD.
[edit] Dear Everybody (2008)
Italian filmmaker and artist Luca Dipierro made a short film based on Dear Everybody, available for viewing here or on youtube.com (search under JONATHONBENDER or DEAR EVERYBODY).
Kimball's third novel, Dear Everybody (2008) was published in the US and Canada, and in the UK, Australia, and South Africa. Dear Everybody developed from a story published in Post Road Magazine called "Excerpts from the Suicide Letters of Jonathon Bender (b.1967-d.2000)." Both Stephen King and Dave Eggers selected it for their lists of notables in Best American Short Stories and Best Non-Required Reading.
Jonathon Bender, the main character of Dear Everybody had something to say, but the world wouldn’t listen. That’s why he writes to everybody he has ever known—including his mother and father, his brother and other relatives, 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.
Christine Schutt, author of Florida, writes of Dear Everybody that “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.” Additional blurbs include:
Maud Casey: “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.”
Gary Lutz: “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.”
Jessica Anya Blau: “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.”
Stephen Graham Jones: “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.”
Brian Evenson: “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.”
[edit] How Much of Us There Was (2005)
Kimball's second novel is the beautiful and heartbreaking How Much of Us There Was (Fourth Estate, 2005; Harper Perennial, 2006 [1]). This is a story about a man's love for his wife as she dies and how he attempts to manage his grief. The intense love from decades of marriage infuses the narrative with a loss and desire, counterbalanced by the voice of an adult grandson who comes to understand what love over a lifetime can mean. Metro London's Claire Allfree writes that "Kimball has created something rare and brave in his second novel." Mariko Kato in Time Out London observes: "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." How Much of Us There Was is forthcoming in Italian, to be published by Feltrinelli.
[edit] The Way the Family Got Away (2000)
The Way the Family Got Away was met with great acclaim in the US and the UK. This novel is the story of a family who suffers from the tragedy of an infant son dying. Told from the alternating perspectives of the surviving boy and girl, The Way the Family Got Away takes the reader on an emotional journey across the American landscape, as both children try, in their different ways, to reconcile what their family was with what it has become. Angus Wolfe Murray of The Scotsman writes: "Occasionally a novel by a new writer will cause critics to choke with excitement. This is one." The Times calls Kimball's novel "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.” And The Book Seller calls The Way “A bleak, powerful and extraordinary debut.”
The Way has been translated into Italian (E allora siamo andati via, Dutch (Onze auto naar de Hemel), German (Eine Familie verschwindet), Portuguese, Spanish (Y la familia se fue), and Hebrew.
[edit] Collaborative Art Projects
Kimball is also part of two collaborative art projects. The first is an interactive performance piece, Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard), which he performs at festivals and which will soon make it to book form. The other is a documentary film, I Will Smash You, which will be released in fall 2008. The trailer for I Will Smash You is posted on youtube.com (search I WILL SMASH YOU).
[edit] Interviews
Kimball discusses The Way the Family Got Away [2]
Kimball discusses How Much of Us There Was [3]
Kimball interviews Sam Lipsyte about the craft of writing fiction in Avatar Review
Kimball interviews Dawn Raffel in [Taint Magazine]
Kimball interviews Deron Bauman about Elimae[[4]] in [Taint Magazine]
Kimball interviews Peter Marcus in [Avatar Review]
