God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer

Author:	Thomas, Joseph Earl
Binding:	Paperback
List Price:	$23.99
Our Price:	$4.20 $3.15 CAD
Qty Avail:	37

Additional Info
Overview

ISBN:	9781538740996
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Language:	English
Page Count:	229
Publication Date:	6/17/2025
Size:	8.00" l x 5.25" w x 0.63"
Series:	N/A

Category	Subject
Fiction	African American
Fiction	Family Life
Fiction	Contemporary

Winner of the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize 2024

Finalist of The Art Seidenbaum LA Times Book Prize

Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence

New York Times Editor's Choice

Publishers Weekly Best Book

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.

ONE OF THE MILLIONS’ MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2024