Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story: All Kinds of Nice Things About Everyday Genius

Thursday, September 10, 2009

All Kinds of Nice Things About Everyday Genius

So I was guest-editing Everyday Genius for the month of August and I ended up with so much genius that the genius himself, Adam Robinson, has let me stay on through a good part of September. And then Matt Bell went and said all kinds of nice things about said editing, including this: "Together, these stories, poems, and Venn diagrams comprise what is certainly one of the best stretches of publication by any magazine, online or off."

Of course, the real genius is constituted by the writers: Stephen Graham Jones, David McLendon, Sean Lovelace, Peter Markus, Gregory Luce, Sherrie Flick, Giancarlo DiTrapano, Stacy Muszynski, Randall Brown, Ken Baumann, Robert Lopez, Gena Mohwish, Elizabeth Ellen, Blake Butler, Ingrid Burrington, Adam Robison, Barry Graham, Jane Hammons, Luca Dipierro, Sasha Fletcher, Matt Bell, Kim Chinquee, Catherine Moran, Andy Devine, J.A. Pak, Tria Andrews, Aaron Burch, Amelia Gray, and Sam Pink.

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Nice Things About Us

Observer: “Powerful and moving ... breathless”
El Placer de la Lectura: “A monument to love”
The Glasgow Herald: “Be warned: this book has the power to make even the most hard-hearted of readers shed a tear. ... Kimball has broken into new territory: Us is one of the most graphic depictions of illness and loss I have ever read.”
Letras Libres: Michael Kimball "already delivers the future of the novel ... [He is] one of the authentic innovators in contemporary fiction."
Blake Butler: “There are two books I can remember that ever made me physically cry. There were the rape scenes in Saramago’s Blindness, and there was nearly every chapter of Michael Kimball’s [Us]. While the first hurt because it was so brutal, Kimball’s was a softer kind of invocation—as I read it in a bathtub, I could not shake the feeling of being held, as if somehow the words had interlaced my skin. This is the essence of the magic Michael Kimball holds—his sentences come on so taut, so right there, and yet somehow so calming, it’s as if you are being visited by some lighted presence.”
El Razón: “Bathed in tenderness ... touching and breathtaking ... one of the most moving, heartbreaking, and sad novels of contemporary American fiction. It is essential.”
Telegraph and Argus: “This is the saddest book I have ever read and one of the most beautiful ... 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.”

Nice Things on Dear Everybody

The Believer: "a curatorial masterpiece"
The LA Times: "funny and warm and sad and heartbreaking"
Time Out New York: "stunning"
The Star-Democrat: "elegantly and eloquently written ... an unforgettable book"
Gary Lutz: “Dear Everybody confirms Kimball's reputation as one of our most supremely gifted and virtuosic renderers of the human predicament.”
Largehearted Boy: "Dear Everybody is a cleverly constructed book that balances pathos and humor exquisitely, and proves Michael Kimball to be a master storyteller."
The Citizen: "superb"
WYPR: “quite a literary feat"
The Faster Times: "Michael Kimball is a badass."
HTMLGIANT: "Dear Everybody is one of the finest, most heartbreaking books I’ve ever read."
David McLendon: "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."
Word Riot: Dear Everybody is "forever embedded in my brain."
Maud Casey: “Dear Everybody has the page-turning urgency of a mystery and the thrilling formal inventiveness of the great epistolary novels.”
HTMLGIANT: "one of the hottest, most innovative books of the year"