God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer

"Joseph Earl Thomas is a writer of incredible gifts. The voice here is so distinctive, galloping with intelligence, poetry, honesty, and humor. Bless You Otis Spunkmeyer spun me around, like many of my favorite novels, it reads like direct communication from the soul."―Justin Torres, author of Blackouts

"What’s thrilling to me about God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer is the faith Joseph Earl Thomas places in his readers. There’s a supersaturation here that reminds me of Denis Johnson’s vertiginous moral questing, and a topography of mind and place that kept making me think of Teju Cole’s poet-doctor of the modern metropolis. Thomas gives us a fully peopled world, not by speaking in grand oracular exposition, but by getting granular—we see the Reebok slides on a romantic rival, the crinkled cookie wrappers out of which grow a friendship. It’s such a deftly choreographed dance—intoxicating, propulsive—and the result is utterly mesmerizing: here is a whole cosmos, as vivid and unprecedented as our own."―Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!

“In this complex novel, a young man lives on two timelines. In one he’s working a very long hospital shift, increasingly dizzy with hunger. In one he relives his history, ‘a version of the truth wrapped in a longer lie,’ working through love and lust, memory and regret. You might call it present time and past time, or body time and head time. While God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer is about all the traps of black reality (poverty, fear, war, sickness, death) it’s also always about language, writing and speech, play and voluminous possibility. Joseph Earl Thomas’s writing is contemplative, hilarious, disorienting, tragic, and thoroughly daring, full of life and style.”―Elisa Gabbert, author of Any Person Is the Only Self