On April 19th, 2025, I pulled out of my contract with a small Portland press that was supposed to publish my novel, Baby in the Night, in January of 2025 (alas, I never even saw full edits or cover art, even months after its scheduled release). I made this page on my website to share with publishers who might be interested in learning more about it.
**UPDATE (June, 2025): Baby in the Night has found a publisher and will coming out in March 2026. More details soon.
About the book:
Baby In the Night (62,000 words, first person, past tense)
The star of this fabulistic adult literary fiction is its narrator, Tony Volcano, as he grows from a baby into a street-smart toddler and preschooler. He lives with his loving mother in a poor neighborhood and grapples with the mystery of where his father is and what happened to him. One night, he takes the first of many journeys into the night-time world, convinced that the moon is his father. This leads him on a strange journey to the truth, as he befriends a teenage junkie and encounters various neighborhood characters, imposter moons, a giant dog, and a droopy-faced messenger. Oh—there’s also a mysterious fax machine found in the alleyway—an alley that Tony thinks might be the hiding spot of face-eating pigs. Told from this unusual point of view, Baby In the Night is a novel that is full of wonder, unexpected humor, innocence, tragedy, and a melancholy firmly laced with magic.
Although I’ve worked 27 years of bookselling at Powell’s, I can’t think of any other book quite like this (not even Ian McEwan’s Nutshell). But fans of Karen Russell, Kelly Link, George Saunders, Hiroko Oyamada, Kevin Wilson, and Mark Leyner, would probably love it. I also feel that the book has a strange kinship with the uniquely tender weirdness of Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. Another thing I’ve said about the book is it’s kind of like Harold and the Purple Crayon as a David Lynch film.
About me:
I’m a Portland writer, collage artist, small press publisher/editor (Future Tense Books), and Powell’s bookseller/events coordinator who is deeply ingrained in Portland’s amazing literary community. I’ve published a novel, This Is Between Us (w/ Tin House) and memoir, A Common Pornography (w/ Harper Perennial), and have appeared in many publications over the years. An essay I wrote for Salon was in Best American Essays 2013. I’ve published short stories in Paper Darts, Joyland, Southwest Review, Diagram, and elsewhere. A book of my collage art and poetry, I Made an Accident, came out in 2022 from Clash Books. A collaboration with artist Emma Jon-Michael Frank, Sean the Stick, was released in 2024.
Kevin Sampsell 