God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer A Novel

An "intoxicating, propulsive...utterly mesmerizing" novel about Black life in Philadelphia and the struggle to build intimate connections through the eyes of a struggling ex-Army grad student (Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!)

After a deployment in the Iraq War, Joseph Thomas is fighting to find his footing. Now a doctoral student and EMS worker, 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.

WINNER OF THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE • LONGLISTED FOR THE CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN FICTION • FINALIST FOR THE ART SEIDENBAUM LA TIMES BOOK PRIZE • A PW BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A NEW YORK TIMES EDITOR'S CHOICE

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.