"This is Between Us is an imperturbable, strange, melancholy (but never maudlin) piece of work. Kevin Sampsell straddles the line between candor and oversharing with an artful grace I found infectious."
?Patrick deWitt, author of Ablutions and The Sisters Brothers
"This is Between Us is an utterly unsentimental and deeply nuanced portrait of a relationship. With great delicacy and compassion, Kevin Sampsell unflinchingly examines love from every angle - sacred and profane, transcendent and mundane. This is Between Us asserts that messy, terrifying, imperfect love is worth it, after all. After reading it, you''ll be a believer.
?Jillian Lauren, author of NY Times bestselling memoir Some Girls and Pretty
"Here is the quiet, funny, heartbreak truth of Real Love. Read it and weep."?Amelia Gray, author of THREATS
"In This is Between Us Kevin Sampsell writes with grace and intimacy about the toughest subject of all?love?and manages to capture a relationship in its natural state: wry and wistful, strange and sexy, humming with desire, quaking with vulnerability."
?Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins
"This is Between Us lets the reader under the covers of what it means to be in human relationships?not the lame-o story everyone so desperately wants to smoothly fit within, but the crumpled and stained and yet still beautiful version we actually live. Kevin Sampsell has written the pieces of our glorious failures and fleeting victories with such poignancy my head and my heart are laughing, bleeding, and above all, dreaming onward. You want this book more than facebook and chocolate. I love it with my whole body."
?Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water
"Finely detailed and beautifully observed, This is Between Us captures the humorous and heart-wrenching intimacies of two people in love. Kevin Sampsell sheds exquisite insight into the way a hundred ordinary moments in a relationship add up to something extraordinary and deeply meaningful. This novel is moving, surprising, and utterly absorbing ? I couldn''t put it down."
?Davy Rothbart, author of My Heart is an Idiot, creator of Found Magazine, contributor to public radio''s This American Life
Critical Praise for Kevin Sampsell''s Memoir: A Common Pornography
?Sampsell shares loneliness with such intensity that his book almost defeats it?both his and yours. Five stars.?
? TIME OUT NEW YORK
?Sampsell has written a memoir almost unlike any other? a fascinating read.?
? TIME OUT CHICAGO
?Its droll style and its archaeological attentiveness to the debris of American life - the remote s, video recorders, tight ends, and one-hit wonders of yesteryear - combined with Sampsell?s talent for observing the ordinary, infuse the most ?common? incidents of growing up with wit and meaning.?
? HARPER''S MAGAZINE
?[A] rather miraculous act of artistic self-creation? his story alone is an adequate metaphor for itself, the life it describes, and its hard-won pleasures.?
? BOOKFORUM
?The material perfectly fits the form, shards of memory fused into a compelling concretion of moments. A worthy addition to the work of such contemporary memoirists as Nick Flynn, Augusten Burroughs, Dave Eggers, and Stephen Elliott?
? BOOKLIST
?Embarrassing and honest, heartbreaking and hilarious. A Common Pornography is a great memoir from one of the Northwest?s best writers.?
?Willy Vlautin, author of Northline and The Motel Life
?Kevin Sampsell?s stories are brief incantations, uppercuts to the gut, prose poems given over to the bloodiest realms of the self. It?s all here: the emotional squalor, the sweet bite of loneliness. Make no mistake: Sampsell can write like hell.?
?Steve Almond, author of My Life in Heavy Metal
?This is a heartbreaking and magnificent book? .I am reminded of Denis Johnson?s Jesus? Son. This is the kind of book where you want to thank the author for helping you feel less alone with being alive.?
?Jonathan Ames, author of Wake Up, Sir! and The Double Life is Twice as Good
?For beauty, honesty, sheer weirdness, and a haunting evocation of place, Kevin Sampsell is my favorite Oregon writer. Ken Kesey, Chuck Palahniuk?make some room on the shelf.?
?Sean Wilsey, author of Oh the Glory of it All
