“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 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
Other reviews and mentions appeared in Time Out New York, Time Out Chicago, Harper’s Magazine,Portland Monthly (December 2009), Poets & Writers, (January/February 2010) and Dennis Cooper’s blog.
And here’s a list of some of my other book-like creations. Most of these are pretty hard to find. So if you got them, you’re lucky (or maybe unlucky, depending on how you look at it).
Kevin Sampsell 