Tyrant Books has released "Us" by Michael Kimball. I impolitely, but with your well-being in mind, urge you to buy now.

$14.95

A husband wakes up to find that his wife has had a seizure during the night. The husband calls an ambulance and his wife is rushed to a hospital where she lies in a coma. By day, the husband sits beside his wife and tries to think of ways to wake her up. At night, the husband sleeps in the chair next to his wife’s bedside dreaming that she will wake up. He wants to be able to take her back home. Years later, the story of this long and loving marriage is retold by their grandson. He wants to understand his grandmother’s life and death, what it meant to his grandfather, and what it means to him. He wants to understand – in his own words – “how love can accumulate between

two people.”

Us from Michael Kimball on Vimeo.

“Michael Kimball never ceases to astonish. He is a hero of contemporary fiction.”

—Sam Lipsyte

“Be warned: this book has the power to make even the most hard-hearted of readers shed a tear. …Kimball has broken into new territory: [Us] is one of the most graphic depictions of illness and loss I have ever read.”

—The Glasgow Herald

“There are two books I can remember that ever made me physically cry. There were the rape scenes in Saramago’s Blindness, and there was nearly every chapter of Michael Kimball’s [Us]. While the first hurt because it was so brutal, Kimball’s was a softer kind of invocation—as I read it in a bathtub, I could not shake the feeling of being held, as if somehow the words had interlaced my skin. This is the essence of the magic Michael Kimball holds—his sentences come on so taut, so right there, and yet somehow so calming, it’s as if you are being visited by some lighted presence.”

—Blake Butler

excerpt

How I Couldn’t Take Any of My Funeral Clothes Off

I went back inside through the back door and walked back to what used to be our bedroom. I was going to take my funeral clothes off, but it felt too difficult to untie my tie or my shoes. It felt too difficult to unbutton my shirt or my pants. I couldn’t take my suit jacket off. It fit a little tight around my shoulders and it felt as if my wife had her arms around me.

My funeral clothes were all that were holding me together then. I was afraid that I would start to forget my wife if I took any of them off. But I didn’t know what else to do after her funeral was over and my wife was buried inside a casket under the ground and I was back inside our house. I kept waiting for her to come back home to me or back to life.

I walked back down the hallway, into the living room, and sat down in a chair. I got up out of the chair and then I sat back down in it. I looked out the window, out into the backyard, and then looked back inside myself.

Auther Bio

Michael Kimball is the author of three critically-acclaimed novels, including Dear Everybody and The Way the Family Got Away. Each of his novels has been translated (or is being translated) into many languages. His work has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered and in Vice, as well as The Guardian, Prairie Schooner, Post Road, Open City, Unsaid, and New York Tyrant. He is also responsible for Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard), the documentary films I Will Smash You and 60 Writers/60 Places, and the conceptual pseudonym, Andy Devine.

If you’ve read the galley and would like to talk about it, please contact Giancarlo DiTrapano at

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Author Website

www.michael-kimball.com