Kevin Sampsell

Get yours: Powell’s Books * Asterism Books

With the release of my novel fast approaching (on 3/17/26), I thought I’d better give you some places to preorder it. Many thanks to my publisher, Impeller Press, and its head coach and designer, Patrick Barber.

“Baby in the Night is a gently surreal journey into and through the moonlit mind of Tony Volcano, who knows all the right questions but does not yet have the words to ask them. What a pleasure to read Kevin Sampsell’s beautiful, loving, hilarious, endlessly surprising prose, to see this realm through Tony’s wise, astonished eyes. I loved crawling along with Tony between daytime world and nighttime world, seeing and believing, suspecting and knowing, secret poetry and slobbery dialogue. I adored Baby in the Night and I bet you will too. A sui generis marvel.” –Karen Russell, author of the national bestselling novel, The Antidote

“Baby in the Night is surreal, tender and magnetic. Sampsell renders the slow-drip arrival of language in our baby-protagonist’s mind with revelatory precision. No book better communicates how the language we use shapes the world we live in, and how we feel and see.” –Rita Bullwinkel, author of Headshot

“Wowsers! Kevin Sampsell has written something so special with Baby in the Night. Tony Volcano, our toddler narrator, spoke directly to the child in me. He offered me his hand and led me through streets filled with violence and compassion. Tony Volcano is proof that sometimes the wisest person in the room might be the two-year-old. This book is surreal, funny, astute, biting, and always deeply moving, true magic.  I’m not sure how Sampsell accomplished this feat of a novel, but I do know I’ll be coming back to it for years to come, trying to figure out how he pulled it off.” –Emme Lund, author of The Boy With a Bird in His Chest 

“Baby in the Night is Harold and the Purple Crayon for the defamiliarization set. Outstanding!” –Caren Beilin, author of Sea, Poison

“Kevin Sampsell has written a wholly unique novel from inside a child’s mind, where reality and fable beautifully blur. Tony Volcano Ventura sneaks out of his big-boy bed to wander the nighttime streets, building meaning from fragments the way children do—through magical thinking, misheard words, and fierce, illogical love. Baby in the Night is a book about absence that somehow feels full, about a boy constructing a mythology to survive the unbearable wait for someone to come home. Sampsell’s sentences are precise and deceptively simple, each one glowing from within.” –Kimberly King Parsons, author of We Were the Universe

“In Sampsell’s characteristically strange, raw, and tender style, we experience the world through the eyes-wide-open observations of the wondrous Tony Volcano–tiny baby, prodigy of the streets, human relationships, and the moon. It’s really fucking good.”  –Charlie J. Stephens, author of A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest

“In the exquisite Baby In the Night, Kevin Sampsell writes a coming-of-age story that isn’t set in the typical adolescent pivot into adulthood but in early childhood when the world and human behavior have a sort of sci-fi oddness, beauty, and menace. A coming-of-being story. Our young hero Tony is on a quest to find out about his father. He watches and imbibes sensations, attentively noting the words and actions around him; permeable and inquisitive, finding the edges of things and people. There’s a central mystery, a loss, like there always is in any life, and the answer will set the stage for the life to come. It’s the most engrossing, tender, and quietly strange book I’ve read in ages.”  –Nate Lippens, author of Ripcord and My Dead Book

“Reading Baby in the Night I entered a slightly fevered state of literary delirium. Absorbed and in awe of the novel’s tender-hearted magic, I dropped all preconceived notions about how the world works and who I’d want to steer me through it. Baby in the Night was a welcome reminder that deep wells of endless wisdom live inside every single one of us, no matter our age. As always, Kevin Sampsell amazed me with each line of prose, how spare and perfect and charged with meaning. Assign his sentences to any creative writing class and let writers be blessed with abundance. This is how you do it, folks. Word by word. Line by line. Until you’ve got Baby in the Night. Incredible.” –Genevieve Hudson, author of Boys of Alabama and Pretend We Live Here

“Baby in the Night is a triumph of surreal weirdness and wonder. Kevin Sampsell is hands down the funniest writer I know; he also happens to have a heart the size of the moon.” —Justin Hocking, author of A Field Guide to the Subterranean

“I didn’t know I wanted to read a book narrated by a baby until I picked up Baby in the Night and was fully spellbound by its singular voice and view. This novel is one of those miracle books–it shouldn’t work! But Sampsell shows us a whole suffering, precious world in a few small city blocks, as seen by one small person. This is a dreamlike pleasure from beginning to end.” –Lydia Kiesling, author of Golden State and Mobility

“The most compelling part of Sampsell’s book, which is written from the perspective of a street smart baby, is how it conveys the inarticulate instinct. Or how a thought or feeling can be perfectly clear on the inside, but emerge all scattered and snarled. Baby in the Night is a fairytale born out of abject poverty. With skewed and comic tenderness, Sampsell teaches readers how to play my new favorite game: WOMB ESCAPE.” –Ash Yang-Thompson, author of Still Worm

“Baby in the Night is deliciously strange and delightfully surreal. Sampsell has once again written a book that will forever live in my head and my heart.” —Carla Crujido, author of The Strange Beautiful

“I’ve been a fan of Sampsell’s for years, and this new novel is beautiful lunacy. If this is a bedtime story, it’s the most batshit one I’ve ever read.” –Joshua Mohr, author of The Wolf Wants Answers

“Baby in the Night is whimsically surreal and wholly devastating. I’m not even quite sure I can describe all the things it made me feel. Contemplative, heartbroken, at times worried and delighted. Through young Tony’s eyes, Sampsell asks us to consider what kind of world we’ll be handing to the children who have yet to come.” –Elle Nash, author of Deliver Me

“What a strange and wondrous document this book is. Kevin Sampsell’s voice is wholly his own—an embodiment of the early 21st century, with its homeless population, its struggles with drugs, its social fabric that somehow still has the innocence of a small village in some distant place. Within these pages you encounter people beset by the daily sufferings of late-stage, metastatic capitalism. And through it all wanders an impossible baby—a kid who both is and isn’t a kid—who is a version of all of us, walking in the cold, moonlit dark. If you like Denis Johnson and Hubert Selby Jr. and the boxes of Joseph Cornell, you will love Baby in the Night, Kevin Sampsell’s magic, miniature marvel.”
—Pauls Toutonghi, author of The Refugee Ocean

The official launch event is Wednesday, March, 18th at 7pm at Powell’s Books, with very special guest and conversation partner, Kimberly King Parsons.

More events (Storyfort in Boise! Frontera in Dallas!) to be announced soon.