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 (Impeller Press) and will coming out on MARCH 17th 2026 and you can PRE-ORDER IT THROUGH ASTERISM.
About the book:
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.
Praise for Baby in the Night
“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
****************
Hope to see you at the launch party at Powell’s!
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 