Books by Joey Goebel
Torture The Artist
by Joey Goebel
The quintessential tortured artist, Vincent Spinetti falls prey to poverty, illness, alienation, parental neglect, alcoholism, nervous breakdowns, and unrequited love, unaware that these torments are caused by the secret manipulations of New Renaissance, an organization testing the idea that art results from suffering. By the author of Anomalies.
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The Anomalies
by Joey Goebel
The Anomalies is the story of five quirky nonconformists who come together to make sweet rock music in their small Midwestern town primarily inhabited by tiny-minded, walking stereotypes.
Luster wants the ultimate form of the American dreamrock stardomdespite being a twenty-four-year-old man living in the ghetto with his crack-dealing brothers. Opal is a sex-crazed party machine despite being an eighty-year-old woman. Ember hates the world and wants to destroy it despite being an eight-year-old girl. Ray loves America and all of its inhabitants despite being a middle-aged, effeminate Iraqi soldier. Aurora is frigid and deplores young people despite being a sexy, Satan-worshiping teenager.
And now these misfits have formed a banda band so different, so utterly unpredictable that they might just be able to slip between a crack, rise above their small-town existence, tour the world, and in the process make us all reconsider our stale old conventions.
Author bio(s) (up to 500 words or 4,000 characters):
Joey Goebel was born and raised in Henderson, Kentucky. He has a BA in English from Brescia University and his short stories have appeared in two anthologies. He is the former lead singer of the punk band The Mullets (Higher Step Records) that toured for five years in the Midwest. The Anomalies is his first novel.
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Commonwealth
“Exquisite. . .Commonwealth is impossible to put down.” — New York Times
#1 New York Times Bestseller | NBCC Award Finalist | New York Times Best Book of the Year | USA Today Best Book | TIME Magazine Top 10 Selection | Oprah Favorite Book | New York Magazine Best Book of The Year
The acclaimed, bestselling author—winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize—tells the enthralling story of how an unexpected romantic encounter irrevocably changes two families’ lives.
One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating’s christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny’s mother, Beverly—thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families.
Spanning five decades, Commonwealth explores how this chance encounter reverberates through the lives of the four parents and six children involved. Spending summers together in Virginia, the Keating and Cousins children forge a lasting bond that is based on a shared disillusionment with their parents and the strange and genuine affection that grows up between them.
When, in her twenties, Franny begins an affair with the legendary author Leon Posen and tells him about her family, the story of her siblings is no longer hers to control. Their childhood becomes the basis for his wildly successful book, ultimately forcing them to come to terms with their losses, their guilt, and the deeply loyal connection they feel for one another.
Told with equal measures of humor and heartbreak, Commonwealth is a meditation on inspiration, interpretation, and the ownership of stories. It is a brilliant and tender tale of the far-reaching ties of love and responsibility that bind us together.
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Commonwealth
Joey Goebel s biggest and funniest novel yet, about red state politics, family traditions, and what happens when the common man fights back. Somewhere in the middle of America dwells Blue Gene Mapother, a trashy, mullet-headed Wal-Mart stockboy-turned-flea-marketer who staunchly supports any American war effort without question. Besides patriotism, little enlivens him except pro wrestling, cigarette breaks, and any instance in which he thinks his masculinity is at stake.
Curiously, he is also a member of one of the wealthiest families in the country; brother to John Hurstbourne Mapother, an up-and-coming politician who decides that Blue Gene's low-class style could be useful, not harmful to his Congressional campaign.
Through dark humor and cinematic story-telling, this small-town epic winds through flea markets to mansions to abandoned Wal-Mart buildings, all the while dramatizing the deranged, absurd relationship between the high and low class of America.
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