ONE OF THE MILLIONS' MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2024
"This is an astonishingly accomplished novel...Just stunning." - Kirkus Reviews, starred review
"Magnificent" - Publisher's Weekly, starred review
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 socio-political 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.
Sprache
Verlagsort
Verlagsgruppe
Produkt-Hinweis
Fadenheftung
Gewebe-Einband
Maße
Höhe: 251 mm
Breite: 164 mm
Dicke: 8 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-1-5387-4098-9 (9781538740989)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
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.
