Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story: Anonymous Love Letters / Don't Give Up

Friday, April 29, 2011

Anonymous Love Letters / Don't Give Up

The artist Cynthia Gray has been collecting anonymous love letters for ten years. It's a beautiful and heartbreaking project and this June I will edit the next collection. Please feel free to send one in. I'm also a distributor for Cynthia Gray's don't give up magnets. If you need one, please let me know.

4 comments:

Sam Ruddick said...: Are you the Michael Kimball who wrote the poems called "Metaphor" (about boats and sails) and "Places I Have Been," which appeared in a magazine called Quarterly about 25 years ago? If so, thanks. I liked them a great deal.; April 29, 2011 at 1:39 PM
Michael Kimball said...: Hi Sam, Yes, that was me. Thanks for remembering those. I write much longer stuff now. Best, M; April 29, 2011 at 1:59 PM
cynthia said...: Well, I was going to say how cool the Don't Give Up magnets were, but even cooler that someone found you 25 yrs later and let you know they liked your poems...

And yes, I need a magnet please, but even without one, I'm not giving up...; April 30, 2011 at 12:08 PM
Michael Kimball said...: Cynthia, Yes, I loved getting Sam's note. Glad that something I wrote what seems like so long ago is remembered by somebody else. It's reassuring. -- I've sent you a note about the magnet. Best, Michael; April 30, 2011 at 12:17 PM

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"

Nice Things About BIG RAY

Sam Lipsyte: “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.”
Dana Spiotta: “Big Ray, the man, made an indelible human impression on me. BIG RAY, Michael Kimball's terrific new novel, is genuinely moving because it is so rigorously unsentimental. Kimball is a powerful and courageous writer.”
Jon McGregor: "BIG RAY, a slim and finely-toned book about an overweight ruin of a father, is an uncompromising work of power and grace. I finished reading it a week ago, but I still can't put it down."
Deb Olin Unferth: "Elegy, meditation, story, final reckoning—whatever you want to call it, BIG RAY is mesmerizing. Sorrowful and honest, the kind of book that compels, not compromises, BIG RAY is an incredible accomplishment."
Madison Smartt Bell: “BIG RAY is disturbing in the most extraordinary ways, and in the end extraordinarily touching also. There’s nothing quite like it I’ve ever read till now (though there were times I thought the ghost of Barry Hannah was whispering in my ear.) It’s amazing what a deep resonance a writer of Michael Kimball’s quality can strike with a very few words.”
Jessica Anya Blau: BIG RAY is stunning, haunting, and beautiful. This groundbreaking and unforgettable novel should not be missed.