Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return

Praise for Martin Riker:

＂Energetic, inquisitive, intellectually ambitious, artistically incandescent, hero- ically sane. . . . [A] mix of avant-garde sophistication and deep, Realist-type concern for character is probably his work ’s salient feature.＂ —David Foster Wallace

When Samuel Johnson dies, he finds himself in the body of the man who killed him, unable to leave this plane or return to the son he left behind. Moving from body to body as each one expires, he inhabits a series of lives as stymied, in many ways, as his own. Samuel Johnson migrates between men and women, young and old, offering us a watchful consideration of the ways experience is mediated, the unstoppable drive for human connection, and the struggle to be more fully alive in the world.

Martin Riker grew up in central Pennsylvania. He worked as a musician for most of his twenties, in nonprofit literary publishing for most of his thirties, and has spent the first half of his forties teaching in the English department at Washington University in St. Louis. In 2010, he and his wife Danielle Dutton co-founded the feminist press Dorothy, a Publishing Project. His fiction and criticism have appeared in publications including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, London Review of Books, the Baffler, and Conjunctions. This is his first novel.