ONE OF THE MILLIONS’ MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2024
“This is an astonishingly accomplished novel…Just stunning.” – Kirkus Reviews, ★ Starred review
“Magnificent” – Publisher’s Weekly, ★ Starred review
”Joseph Earl Thomas’s voice here is so distinctive, galloping with intelligence, poetry, honesty, and humor. Like many of my favorite novels, it reads like a direct communication from the soul,” –Justin Torres, author of Blackouts
”I have never read something so fucking funny and so fucking weird and so fucking full—full of language and full of traumas full of niggas. Fam, Joseph has something here that is so bursting with 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
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…read more
the author
Joseph Earl Thomas is the author of Sink, a memoir (Grand Central Publishing, 2023), longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and shortlisted for the Patrick Saroyan International Writing Prize; the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer (Grand Central Publishing, 2024), longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Literary Excellence, finalist for the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award, winner of the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize; and the forthcoming story collection Leviathan Beach (Grand Central, 2025). His prose and poetry has been published or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, Harper’s, Virginia Quarterly Review, Vanity Fair, The Yale Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Dilettante Army. His honors include the 2020 Chautauqua Janus Prize, and fellowships from Kimbilio, VONA, Tin House and Bread Loaf. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame’s MFA program in prose, he earned his PhD in English from The University of Pennsylvania. He is a member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College, and teaches courses in Black Studies, Poetics, Video Games, Queer Theory and more at The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.
“A brilliant coming-of-age story.”
—New York Times
“Thomas is a skilled prose stylist, and Sink is loaded with arresting imagery and insights into the eerie space between claustrophobia and freedom unique to childhood.”
―Vulture
"[A] wrenching debut. . .Thomas’s prose delivers an emotional gut punch. . .The result is a lyrical exploration of identity and survival."
―Publishers Weekly
“A fearless debut that will change your life.”—Debutiful
“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
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