God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer Audiobook By Joseph Earl Thomas cover art

God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer

A Novel

Preview

Try for $0.00
Prime logo Prime members: New to Audible?
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer

By: Joseph Earl Thomas
Narrated by: JD Jackson
Try for $0.00

$14.95/month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $14.81

Buy for $14.81

Confirm purchase
Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
Cancel

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.

©2024 Joseph Earl Thomas (P)2024 Grand Central Publishing
African American City Life Family Life Friendship Urban Heartfelt Hospital
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

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

What listeners say about God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    3
  • 4 Stars
    2
  • 3 Stars
    1
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0
Performance
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    4
  • 4 Stars
    2
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0
Story
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    2
  • 4 Stars
    3
  • 3 Stars
    1
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Sort by:
Filter by:
  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

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.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!