Joseph Earl Thomas's 6 favorite books that tackle social issues

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Joseph Earl Thomas is the author of the 2023 memoir "Sink," which chronicles his childhood and the solace he found in geek culture. His debut novel, "God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer," follows an Iraq War vet turned EMS worker in North Philadelphia.

"or, on being the other woman" by Simone White (2022)

These experiments in lyric poetry raise the bar for the syntactically possible — an amalgamation of bluntness, high theory, rage, subtlety, and feminist inquiry that performs space-clearing gestures in your mind long after you put the book down. I'm still striving to be "unsentimental and intimate" with everyone; it is not easy. Buy it here. 

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"Potted Meat" by Steven Dunn (2016)

A slim book told in deft fragments straight out of southern West Virginia. Incredibly underrated with its high precision of language and the risks Dunn takes in detailing racialized intimacy and class violence with heart and humor. Buy it here. 

"Year of the Rat" by Marc Anthony Richardson (2016)

This no-bullshit Philly realist novel about an artist caring for his sick mother contains some of my favorite, most visceral sentences of all time. Buy it here. 

"Hurricane Season" by Fernanda Melchor (2017)

Fernanda Melchor does not play. This circuitous novel is born from incidents that occurred during Melchor's time as a journalist in and around Veracruz, Mexico. You can hear the region's black ancestry in the voices of her characters, even as Melchor reconfigures the murder mystery in a slew of voice-driven details that get better on every read. Buy it here. 

"Minor Detail" by Adania Shibli (2017)

Shibli's novel, a National Book Award finalist, unfolds in two distinct sections. The first follows Israeli soldiers during the 1949 Nakba who rape and murder a girl, while the second follows a present-day Palestinian academic who can't help but transgress borders — both mental and physical. Throughout, Shibli changes styles from the flat internalizations of colonial violence to the infinite neurosis and social constrictions brought on as it persists. Buy it here.   

"Mosquito" by Gayl Jones (1999)

This novel follows Mosquito, a black woman truck driver, and her branching streams of thought in black vernacular concerning politics, poststructuralism, love, the generalized antagonisms of the everyday, and — what I enjoy more every time I return to this book — her friends. Mosquito's homegirls Monkey Bread and Delgadina are consistently unsentimental thought partners as she navigates an incredibly hostile, hilarious world. Buy it here.