Leviathan Beach

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.

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.

• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
• Published: May 6, 2025
  
• ISBN: 9781538741016, 1538741016
  
• Hardcover: 192 pages
  
• BISAC: Fiction / Short Stories (single author)