Dinaw Mengestu & Joseph Earl Thomas on Their New Novels

In Dinaw Mengestu's Someone Like Us, the son of Ethiopian immigrants seeks to understand a hidden family history and uncovers a past colored by unexpected loss, addiction, and the enduring emotional pull toward home. And Joseph Earl Thomas's God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer is 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 that “reads like a direct communication from the soul,” (Justin Torres) from the virtuoso author of Sink. 

Mengestu: After abandoning his once-promising career as a journalist in search of a new life in Paris, Mamush meets Hannah—a photographer whose way of seeing the world shows him the possibility of finding not only love but family. Now, five years later, with his marriage to Hannah on the verge of collapse, he returns to the close-knit immigrant Ethiopian community of Washington, DC, that defined his childhood. At its center is Mamush’s stoic, implacable mother, and Samuel, the larger-than-life father figure whose ceaseless charm and humor have always served as a cover for a harder, more troubling truth. But on the same day that Mamush arrives home in Washington, Samuel is found dead in his garage.

Thomas: 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.

The narrator of God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, like the narrator of Someone Like Us, shares a very clear ethos/aesthetics when it comes to how he tells his story. Both narrators are skeptical of straightforward narratives that reveal too much, in part because of the lives they've lived, and their relationship to their own families. Likewise, both novels are deeply rooted in the experiences of these communities: Washington, DC and Philadelphia. 

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Dinaw Mengestu is the author of three novels, all of which were named New York Times Notable Books: All Our Names, How to Read the Air, and The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. A native of Ethiopia who came with his family to the United States at the age of two, Mengestu is also a freelance journalist who has reported about life in Darfur, northern Uganda, and eastern Congo. His articles and fiction have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Jane, and Rolling Stone. He is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow and recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction, a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Prize, Guardian First Book Award, and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, among other honors. He was also included in The New Yorker’s 20 under 40 list in 2010. Photo credit Anne-Emmanuelle Robicquet

 

Joseph Earl Thomas is the author of the memoir Sink, and the novel, God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer. He teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College, and courses in Literature and Black Studies at The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.