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Tracing the nuances of a short-lived life, this involving and sympathetically written novel maintains a tone of finely judged tension between laughter and tears. Jonathon Bender had something to tell the world, but the world wouldn’t listen. However, he left behind him unsent letters addressed to relatives, friends, neighbors, coaches, teachers, classmates, professors, roommates, psychiatrists, employers, his younger self, former girlfriends, his ex-wife, a TV station, and God, among many others. This unsent correspondence forms the narrative of a remarkable life.
Published in paperback March 2010.
"Believable and tragic." - Baltimore Magazine
"Elegantly and eloquently written." - Star-Democrat
"Occasionally a novel by a new writer will cause critics to choke with excitement. This is one." - Scotsman
"I love this book, love the strangely detailed world that accumulates through letters, lists, yearbook quotes, and psychological evaluations. And I love the character of Jonathon Bender, the way he makes me so sad and also makes me laugh so hard. He will stay with me forever." - Jessica Anya Blau, author, The Summer of Naked Swim Parties
"By turns hilarious and haunting- and always thrillingly deep, surprising, and pitch-perfect . . . confirms Kimball's reputation as one of our most supremely gifted and virtuosic renderers of the human predicament. It's as moving a novel as I have read in years." - Gary Lutz, author, Stories in the Worst Way
"A reader can only embrace the open-armed Dear Everybody .... In Bender’s unsent letters of apology or thanks, Michael Kimball transforms the familiar into the strange again and the simplest confessions are made moments of sublime wonder. Hold on to this book." - Christine Schutt, author, Florida, a National Book Award finalist, and winner of the O. Henry Prize and Pushcart Prize
"The page-turning urgency of a mystery and the thrilling formal inventiveness of the great epistolary novels. Jonathon Bender's magical letters to the world that never wrote to him are at once whimsical, anguished, funny, utterly engaging and, finally, unforgettable." - Maud Casey, author, Genealogy
"Thank you for this book. What Jonathon Bender writes in his unsent letters are what each of us longs to say, what all of us have been saying our whole lives, just not out loud." - Stephen Graham Jones, author, Demon Theory
This information about Dear Everybody was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Michael Kimball is the author of How Much of Us There Was and The Way the Family Got Away. He lives in Baltimore.
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