Description
FINALIST FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE - LONGLISTED FOR THE CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN FICTION - A PW BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR - A NEW YORK TIMES EDITOR'S CHOICE PICK - NAMED BEST OF JUNE BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND BOOKRIOT - ONE OF THE MILLIONS' MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2024
A stirring, unsparing novel about Black life in Philadelphia and the struggle to build intimate connections through the eyes of a struggling ex-Army grad student that "reads like a direct communication from the soul," (Justin Torres) from the virtuoso author of Sink. After a deployment in the Iraq War dually defined by threat and interminable mundanity, Joseph Thomas is fighting to find his footing. Now a doctoral student at The University, and an EMS worker at the hospital in North Philly, he encounters round the clock friends and family from his past life and would-be future at his job, including contemporaries of his estranged father, a man he knows little about, serving time at Holmesburg prison for the statutory rape of his then-teenage mother. Meanwhile, he and his best friend Ray, a fellow vet, are alternatingly bonding over and struggling with their shared experience and return to civilian life, locked in their own rhythms of lust, heartbreak, and responsibility. Balancing the joys and frustrations of single fatherhood, his studies, and ceaseless shifts at the hospital as he becomes closer than he ever imagined to his father, Joseph tries to articulate vernacular understandings of the sociopolitical struggles he recounts as participant-observer at home, against the assumptions of his friends and colleagues. GOD BLESS YOU, OTIS SPUNKMEYER is a powerful examination of every day black life--of health and sex, race and punishment, and the gaps between our desires and our politics.FINALIST FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE "Like the work of Jackson Pollock, the novel reveals itself the longer one spends time with it. Keep looking, the chaos will start to show its pattern, its rhythm, its dimension and its awe-inspiring color." - New York Times Book Review "An astonishingly accomplished novel...Just stunning." - Kirkus Reviews, starred review
Author: Joseph Earl Thomas
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 06/18/2024
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.78lbs
Size: 8.49h x 5.77w x 0.89d
ISBN13: 9781538740989
ISBN10: 1538740982
BISAC Categories:
- Fiction | African American & Black | General
- Fiction | Family Life | General
- Fiction | Friendship
A stirring, unsparing novel about Black life in Philadelphia and the struggle to build intimate connections through the eyes of a struggling ex-Army grad student that "reads like a direct communication from the soul," (Justin Torres) from the virtuoso author of Sink. After a deployment in the Iraq War dually defined by threat and interminable mundanity, Joseph Thomas is fighting to find his footing. Now a doctoral student at The University, and an EMS worker at the hospital in North Philly, he encounters round the clock friends and family from his past life and would-be future at his job, including contemporaries of his estranged father, a man he knows little about, serving time at Holmesburg prison for the statutory rape of his then-teenage mother. Meanwhile, he and his best friend Ray, a fellow vet, are alternatingly bonding over and struggling with their shared experience and return to civilian life, locked in their own rhythms of lust, heartbreak, and responsibility. Balancing the joys and frustrations of single fatherhood, his studies, and ceaseless shifts at the hospital as he becomes closer than he ever imagined to his father, Joseph tries to articulate vernacular understandings of the sociopolitical struggles he recounts as participant-observer at home, against the assumptions of his friends and colleagues. GOD BLESS YOU, OTIS SPUNKMEYER is a powerful examination of every day black life--of health and sex, race and punishment, and the gaps between our desires and our politics.FINALIST FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE "Like the work of Jackson Pollock, the novel reveals itself the longer one spends time with it. Keep looking, the chaos will start to show its pattern, its rhythm, its dimension and its awe-inspiring color." - New York Times Book Review "An astonishingly accomplished novel...Just stunning." - Kirkus Reviews, starred review
Author: Joseph Earl Thomas
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 06/18/2024
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.78lbs
Size: 8.49h x 5.77w x 0.89d
ISBN13: 9781538740989
ISBN10: 1538740982
BISAC Categories:
- Fiction | African American & Black | General
- Fiction | Family Life | General
- Fiction | Friendship
About the Author
Joseph Earl Thomas is a writer from Frankford whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in VQR, N+1, Gulf Coast, The Offing, and The Kenyon Review. He has an MFA in prose from The University of Notre Dame and is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania. An excerpt of his memoir, Sink, won the 2020 Chautauqua Janus Prize and he has received fellowships from Fulbright, VONA, Tin House, and Bread Loaf. He's writing the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, and a collection of stories, Leviathan Beach, among other oddities.