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A wild and wildly original debut story collection that explores the present and future, violence and justice, the fantastic and the everyday, from Joseph Earl Thomas, “a writer of incredible gifts” (Justin Torres) who brought us Sink and God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer.

In LEVIATHAN BEACH the thin veil between fantasy and reality ceases to exist. Thomas’ concerns with war, labor, sex and the shared prospects of biological life on this planet depict human beings as minimum wage plovers in the title story, whereas disgruntled green anoles become a child’s potential salvation in “Cold War Kirby.” In “Xscape from the Dark Dimension” a young girl takes on the skin of a demon, while in “Half an Inch at Best” a group of soldiers get more than they bargained for out of sexual tourism. A lonely divorcee travels the world to perform assisted suicides in “The Ferryman is Now Accepting Visa,” and in “Monday,” two medics may finally learn to love each other over a Socratic dialogue in the front of an ambulance. With brilliant, often humorous prose, Joseph Earl Thomas approaches his subject matter with scalpel-like precision, revealing profound truths and posing incisive questions at the level of the speculative and the hyper-real.

Both solemn and searching, scathing and indignant, Thomas reflects on the multi-headed Leviathan of the present with great curiosity about life and little respect for mere tolerance, asking what it means to dream of a better future when the world has been crumbling around you.

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PRAISE FOR SINK“Thomas really does accomplish the extraordinary…[He] has constructed a sort of alchemy on the page, but one born of experience, from skill and from a trust about what will end up on the other side…perhaps one of the biggest boons of Sink is its insistence that care is, above all, shared. It is everyone’s prerogative. In this way, Thomas has earned a deep bow.”
New York Times Book Review
"For the reader, third-person narration creates a buffer to a brutal coming of age, and perhaps allows Thomas enough distance from his trauma to bravely expose the vulnerability and resilience of his youth."
Washington Post
PRAISE FOR GOD BLESS YOU, OTIS SPUNKMEYER

"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
"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
"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
"Joseph Earl Thomas has created a narrative that reads like a request and loving demand. Sink is a new kind of memoir, remixing the best parts of the genre. Though cohesive, the chapters in Sink are brilliant and brilliantly different. Thomas uses the act and politics of oration to move us within the silences of desire. It’s the way Thomas narrativizes encounters that make this book different than any memoir I’ve read, but also, so more propellant than any memoir in recent years. It is criminal and absolutely delicious that Sink is a literary debut. It is stunning in its audacious goodness."
Kiese Laymon, award-winning author of Heavy
“Sink is a singular memoir; all blood and nerve and near-unbearable beauty. A brilliant and fucking fearless debut.”
Carmen Maria Machado, award-winning author of In the Dream House
"Joseph Earl Thomas’s Sink is a powerful, moving, and artful testament to the sustaining powers of the imagination. This compelling coming-of-age memoir is often brutal but also loving; it’s at turns critical, empathic, funny; it’s searching and revelatory the whole way through. Joey is a narrator for the ages, a boy whose unforgettable story dares expanding the possibilities of Black male identity."
Mitchell S. Jackson, award-winning author of Survival Math
"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
"[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
PRAISE FOR GOD BLESS YOU, OTIS SPUNKMEYER"This is an astonishingly accomplished novel, often funny, often tragic...Just stunning."
Kirkus Reviews, starred review

On Sale: May 6, 2025
Page Count: 192 pages
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN-13: 9781538741016

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Joseph Earl Thomas

About the Author

Joseph Earl Thomas is the author of Sink, a memoir, the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, and the story collection Leviathan Beach (Grand Central, 2025). His prose, poetry and criticism has been published in The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Dilettante Army, and The New York Times Book Review. Sink was longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame’s MFA program in prose, he earned his PhD in English at The University of Pennsylvania and teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College. At The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, he also teaches courses in Black Studies, Poetics, Queer Theory, and Video Games.

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Joseph Earl Thomas

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