God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer

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–-“It’s hard to list all the themes Thomas tackles with aplomb in this book - just know it’s smart, fast moving and funny as hell.” –NPR”[A] rollicking stream of consciousness, flowing from a writer with an extraordinarily endless well of humor, fervor, and conviction.“–BOMB Magazine

“Thomas expertly employs a stream-of-consciousness style…The result is a kaleidoscopic tour through Joseph’s eventful life. God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer is an intricate and brave debut that readers will savor.”

–Bookpage, starred review“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“Joseph’s travails, told in a forceful stream of consciousness, expose the daily rhythms, obstacles and joys of one man’s life.”–Washington Post”[M]agnificent…In a remarkable feat of formal invention, Thomas collapses time and space, melding Joey’s memories with descriptions of patients in the ER…Thomas scales great heights with this innovative blend of social realism and surrealism.“–Publisher’s Weekly, starred review“This is an astonishingly accomplished novel, often funny, often tragic…Just stunning.” –Kirkus Reviews, starred review“I have never read something so fucking funny and so fucking weird and so fucking full–full of life full of language full of traumas full of niggas. Fam, Joseph has something here that is so bursting of everything you want in a book that reading it will burst you open too. He is a virtuoso. I hate this nigga.”–Damon Young, author of What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir in Essays“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!“Ribald, seething, lyrical, generous, heartbroken, and brilliant – God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer is a staggering literary achievement, one of those rare books that breaks and remakes the very idea of the novel. With unflinching courage, luminous spirit, and a virtuosic flow, Joseph Earl Thomas has written a Joycean Ulysses inside a Philly E.R., bodying forth the voice of a true American original.” –Roy Scranton, author of War Porn and Learning to Die in the Anthropocene“God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer is Joseph Earl Thomas’ formidable, groundbreaking debut. There’s so much magic in the rare combination of tenderness, humor, and heartbreak contained in this story. Our narrator, Joseph, is unlike any character I’ve read, just as Thomas’ debut has no equal.”–Cleyvis Natera, author of Neruda on the Park“Joseph Earl Thomas’s God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer is a brilliant novel of hunger and work and care and grief that deftly captures the maddening mess of everything that makes life worth living. Thomas is a skilled, surgical prose stylist; his sentences are magnificent scalpels. There isn’t a single dull line in the book. God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer is unpredictable, unsentimental, and impressively tender.” –Isle McElroy, author of People Collide

“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