God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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JD Jackson
About this listen
A stirring, unsparing novel about Black life in Philadelphia and the struggle to build intimate connections through the eyes of a struggling ex-Army grad student, from the "extraordinary [and] insightful" author of Sink (New York Times Book 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 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.
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Critic reviews
“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
"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
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A queer and dangerously hungry mountain lion lives in the drought-devastated land under the Hollywood sign. Lonely and fascinated by humanity’s foibles, the lion spends their days protecting the welfare of a nearby homeless encampment, observing obnoxious hikers complain about their trauma, and, in quiet moments, grappling with the complexities of their gender identity, memories of a vicious father, and the indignities of sentience. “I have so much language in my brain,” our lion says, “and nowhere to put it.”
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Gentle storytelling that packs a punch.
- By Caleb Clark on 08-01-23
By: Henry Hoke
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Youngblood
- A Novel
- By: Matt Gallagher
- Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne
- Length: 12 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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The US military is preparing to withdraw from Iraq, and newly minted lieutenant Jack Porter struggles to accept how it's happening - through alliances with warlords who have Arab and American blood on their hands. Day after day Jack tries to assert his leadership in the sweltering, dreary atmosphere of Ashuriyah. But his world is disrupted by the arrival of veteran sergeant Daniel Chambers, whose aggressive style threatens to undermine the fragile peace that the troops have worked hard to establish.
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Great book about an unclear war
- By Benjamin D Douglass on 03-16-16
By: Matt Gallagher
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Sink
- A Memoir
- By: Joseph Earl Thomas
- Narrated by: Joseph Earl Thomas
- Length: 6 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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"A brilliant and brilliantly different" (Kiese Laymon), wrenching and redemptive coming-of-age memoir about the difficulty of growing up in a hazardous home and the glory of finding salvation in geek culture.
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Great memoir
- By Jason on 02-26-23
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Missionaries
- A Novel
- By: Phil Klay
- Narrated by: MacLeod Andrews, Cynthia Farrell, Henry Leyva, and others
- Length: 14 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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A group of Colombian soldiers prepares to raid a drug lord's safe house on the Venezuelan border. They're watching him with an American-made drone, about to strike using military tactics taught to them by US soldiers who honed their skills to lethal perfection in Iraq. In Missionaries, Phil Klay examines the globalization of violence through the interlocking stories of four characters and the conflicts that define their lives.
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Captivating, realistic, and touching
- By Derek Long on 02-11-21
By: Phil Klay
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All the Ruined Men
- Stories
- By: Bill Glose
- Narrated by: Shawn Compton
- Length: 8 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Combat takes a different toll on each soldier; so does coming home. All the Ruined Men by Bill Glose comprises linked stories that show veterans struggling for normalcy as they grapple with flashbacks, injuries (both physical and psychological), damaged relationships, loss of faith, and loss of memory. Beginning in 2003, All the Ruined Men spans ten years, from the confident beginning of America’s “forever war” to the confusion and disillusionment that followed.
By: Bill Glose
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Girl at War
- A Novel
- By: Sara Novic
- Narrated by: Julia Whelan
- Length: 7 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Zagreb, 1991. Ana Jurić is a carefree 10-year-old, living with her family in a small apartment in Croatia's capital. But that year, civil war breaks out across Yugoslavia, splintering Ana's idyllic childhood. Daily life is altered by food rations and air raid drills, and soccer matches are replaced by sniper fire. Neighbors grow suspicious of one another, and Ana's sense of safety starts to fray. When the war arrives at her doorstep, Ana must find her way in a dangerous world.
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A perfectly timed departure from the predictable template.
- By Sara on 06-03-15
By: Sara Novic
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Open Throat
- By: Henry Hoke
- Narrated by: Pete Cross
- Length: 1 hr and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
A queer and dangerously hungry mountain lion lives in the drought-devastated land under the Hollywood sign. Lonely and fascinated by humanity’s foibles, the lion spends their days protecting the welfare of a nearby homeless encampment, observing obnoxious hikers complain about their trauma, and, in quiet moments, grappling with the complexities of their gender identity, memories of a vicious father, and the indignities of sentience. “I have so much language in my brain,” our lion says, “and nowhere to put it.”
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Gentle storytelling that packs a punch.
- By Caleb Clark on 08-01-23
By: Henry Hoke
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How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water
- A Novel
- By: Angie Cruz
- Narrated by: Kimberly M. Wetherell, Rossmery Almonte
- Length: 6 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Cara Romero thought she would work at the factory of little lamps for the rest of her life. But when, in her mid-50s, she loses her job in the Great Recession, she is forced back into the job market for the first time in decades. Set up with a job counselor, Cara instead begins to narrate the story of her life.
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Fascinating
- By Tails32x on 09-20-22
By: Angie Cruz
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Misinterpretation
- By: Ledia Xhoga
- Narrated by: Morgan Hallett
- Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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In present-day New York City, an Albanian interpreter reluctantly agrees to work with Alfred, a Kosovar torture survivor, during his therapy sessions. Despite her husband’s cautions, she soon becomes entangled in her clients’ struggles: Alfred’s nightmares stir up her own buried memories, and an impulsive attempt to help a Kurdish poet leads to a risky encounter and a reckless plan. As ill-fated decisions stack up, jeopardizing the nameless narrator’s marriage and mental health, she takes a spontaneous trip to reunite with her mother in Albania.
By: Ledia Xhoga
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The City in Glass
- By: Nghi Vo
- Narrated by: Susan Dalian
- Length: 6 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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The demon Vitrine—immortal, powerful, and capricious—loves the dazzling city of Azril. She has mothered, married, and maddened the city and its people for generations, and built it into a place of joy and desire, revelry and riot. And then the angels come, and the city falls. Vitrine is left with nothing but memories and a book containing the names of those she has lost—and an angel, now bound by her mad, grief-stricken curse to haunt the city he burned.
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No investment
- By Kevin Alan Wenner on 11-07-24
By: Nghi Vo
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Catalina
- A Novel
- By: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
- Narrated by: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
- Length: 6 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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When Catalina is admitted to Harvard, it feels like the fulfillment of destiny: a miracle child escapes death in Latin America, moves to Queens to be raised by her undocumented grandparents, and becomes one of the chosen. But nothing is simple for Catalina, least of all her own complicated, contradictory, ruthlessly probing mind. Now a senior, she faces graduation to a world that has no place for the undocumented; her sense of doom intensifies her curiosities and desires. She infiltrates the school’s elite subcultures—internships and literary journals, posh parties and secret societies.
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Monotone delivery
- By Patricia M Hart on 11-01-24
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The Horse
- A Novel
- By: Willy Vlautin
- Narrated by: Willy Vlautin
- Length: 5 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Al Ward lives on an isolated mining claim in the high desert of central Nevada fifty miles from the nearest town. A grizzled man in his sixties, he survives on canned soup, instant coffee, and memories of his ex-wife, friends and family he’s lost, and his life as a touring musician. Hampered by insomnia, bouts of anxiety, and a chronic lethargy that keeps him from moving back to town, Al finds himself teetering on the edge of madness and running out of reasons to go on—until a horse arrives on his doorstep: nameless, blind, and utterly helpless.
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Wonderful audio book!
- By Carolina Wilde on 08-15-24
By: Willy Vlautin
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How to Age Disgracefully
- A Novel
- By: Clare Pooley
- Narrated by: Clare Corbett
- Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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When Lydia takes a job running the Senior Citizens’ Social Club three afternoons a week, she assumes she’ll be spending her time drinking tea and playing gentle games of cards. The members of the Social Club, however, are not at all what Lydia was expecting. From Art, a failed actor turned kleptomaniac to Daphne, who has been hiding from her dark past for decades to Ruby, a Banksy-style knitter who gets revenge in yarn, these seniors look deceptively benign—but when age makes you invisible, secrets are so much easier to hide.
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Aging imperfections
- By Susan Love on 08-07-24
By: Clare Pooley
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Headshot
- A Novel
- By: Rita Bullwinkel
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 5 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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An unexpected tragedy at a community pool. A family’s unrelenting expectation of victory. The desire to gain or lose control; to make time speed up or stop; to be frighteningly, undeniably good at something. Each of the eight teenage girl boxers in this blistering debut novel has her own reasons for the sacrifices she has made to come to Reno, Nevada, to compete to be named the best in the country.
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Blah
- By sarah belson on 05-29-24
By: Rita Bullwinkel
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Swift River
- By: Essie Chambers
- Narrated by: Shayna Small, Janina Edwards, Robin Miles
- Length: 10 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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It’s the summer of 1987 in Swift River, and Diamond Newberry is learning how to drive. Ever since her Pop disappeared seven years ago, she and her mother hitchhike everywhere they go. But that’s not the only reason Diamond stands out: she’s teased relentlessly about her weight, and since Pop’s been gone, she is the only Black person in all of Swift River. This summer, Ma is determined to declare Pop legally dead so that they can collect his life insurance money, get their house back from the bank, and finally move on.
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Swift river is not so swift.
- By Drkarjck on 11-10-24
By: Essie Chambers
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The Mighty Red
- A Novel
- By: Louise Erdrich
- Narrated by: Marin Ireland
- Length: 11 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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In Argus, North Dakota, a collection of people revolve around a fraught wedding. Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms, is desperate to marry Kismet Poe, an impulsive, lapsed Goth who can't read her future but seems to resolve his. Hugo, a gentle red-haired, home-schooled giant, is also in love with Kismet. He’s determined to steal her and is eager to be a home wrecker. Kismet's mother, Crystal, hauls sugar beets for Gary's family, and on her nightly runs, tunes into the darkness of late-night radio, sees visions of guardian angels.
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Amazing!
- By Hollis Corwin on 10-07-24
By: Louise Erdrich
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Same as It Ever Was
- A Novel
- By: Claire Lombardo
- Narrated by: Emily Rankin
- Length: 18 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Julia Ames, after a youth marked by upheaval and emotional turbulence, has found herself on the placid plateau of mid-life. But Julia has never navigated the world with the equanimity of her current privileged class. Having nearly derailed herself several times, making desperate bids for the kind of connection that always felt inaccessible to her, she finally feels, at age fifty seven, that she has a firm handle on things. She’s unprepared, though, for what comes next.
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Long winded
- By Brooke on 09-17-24
By: Claire Lombardo
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The Serviceberry
- By: Robin Wall Kimmerer
- Narrated by: Robin Wall Kimmerer
- Length: 1 hr and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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As Indigenous scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love. Meanwhile, the serviceberry’s relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity.
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Relevant, kind, challenging
- By Andrew Petro on 11-19-24
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Martyr!
- A Novel
- By: Kaveh Akbar
- Narrated by: Arian Moayed
- Length: 10 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past.
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One of the best novels I have ever read/heard.
- By James on 04-06-24
By: Kaveh Akbar
What listeners say about God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Stephanie W.
- 07-23-24
Another Perspective of Urban Life
I enjoyed the cadence of the narration as it touched on many themes which occupied the thoughts of the main character. I appreciate that all characters were multidimensional. The insight of the main character as he was not only trying to survive, but thrive in his world and beyond was refreshing and real. I read the reviews regarding the book in print and there were comments regarding grammar. I would suggest listening to the book, as the full flavor of the text comes out in the spoken word.
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