Sam Lipsyte (author of Home Land, The Subject Steve, and Venus Drive) calls Kimball "a hero of contemporary fiction.
[9] Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask, says Michael Kimball has been writing innovative, compelling and beautifully felt books for years, but Big Ray seems a break-through and culmination all at once.
It's funny and terrifying and it's his masterpiece, at least so far.” Jon McGregor, author of This Isn’t the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You, calls Big Ray “An uncompromising work of power and grace.
[11] Time Out Chicago gave Us 5 stars: "The sentences and even paragraphs simulate the stunned but dutiful response to the suffering of a loved one: short, raw and somewhat elliptical, wrapping themselves around the small tasks at hand and the larger questions constantly raised.
Time Out-New York says that Dear Everybody includes "stunning prose" and that the letters "harbor such a strange emotional power that you’ll find them hard to forget.
That’s why he writes to everybody he has ever known—including his mother and father, his brother and other relatives, his childhood friends and neighbors, the Tooth Fairy, his classmates and teachers, his psychiatrists, his ex-girlfriends and his ex-wife, the state of Michigan, a television station, and a weather satellite.
Told from the alternating perspectives of the surviving boy and girl, the novel takes the reader on an emotional journey across the American landscape, as both children try, in their different ways, to reconcile what their family was with what it has become.
The Times called Kimball's novel "moving and clever: the open road, so long a symbol of freedom and self-discovery in American fiction, is here rendered as denuded of promise, embodying desertion, desolation and rootlessness.