Samuel Johnson's Eternal Return

After he dies, Samuel Johnson inhabits one body after the next, waiting for a chance to return to his son.

When Samuel Johnson dies, he finds himself in the body of the man who killed him, unable to depart this world but determined, at least, to return to the son he left behind. Moving from body to body as each one expires, Samuel’s soul journeys on a comic quest through an American half-century, inhabiting lives as stymied, in their ways, as his own. A ghost story of the most unexpected sort, Martin Riker’s extraordinary debut is about the ways experience is mediated, the unstoppable drive for human connection, and the struggle to be more fully alive in the world.

Publication date: October 9, 2018

Format: Trade Paper

Dimesions: 5.5 x 8.25

Page count: 256 pages

ISBN: 9781566895286

Thanks to a 2013 ADA Access Improvement Grant administered by VSA Minnesota for the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, this title is also formatted for screen readers which make text accessible to the blind and visually impaired. To purchase this title for use with a screen reader please email us at info@coffeehousepress.org.

Martin Riker grew up in central Pennsylvania. He worked as a musician for most of his twenties, worked 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, New York Times, London Review of Books, the Baffler, and Conjunctions. This is his first novel.

“Riker is a gifted storyteller, and his novel’s enchanting exploration of humanity and philosophy, of how humans connect with their environment and community, is unforgettable.”

—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Riker brings a unique, cheerfully grotesque sensibility to his crack at this hallucinatory mini-genre, emphasizing the bleakest aspects of his premise as he roves through a swath of the past half-century of American life.” 

—The New York Times

“The debut of Riker’s first novel, Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return, is so thrilling for us bookish types.”

—The Millions

“Riker indefatigably charts the American psyche decade by decade.”

—The New Yorker

“This is a comic-philosophical novel, the other side of the same coin as Milan Kundera’s ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being.’”

—The Wall Street Journal

“A lush, comic, and bighearted journey through the minds and experiences of American strangers.”

—Literary Hub

“Like a television rerun, Samuel’s situation repeats, but the story of his eternal return does end, as all books must, in a manner that is absolutely dazzling.”

—The Los Angeles Times

“A quirky, multi-bodied story.”

—Shelf Awareness

“Reincarnation, cycles of violence, and the history of television: Martin Riker’s debut novel finds an intriguing overlap between a host of seemingly disparate subjects.”

—Vol. 1 Brooklyn

“A masterclass in writing compelling, well-crafted fiction.”

—Boulevard

“A darkly funny contemporary story.”

—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return is the needle and thread that connects life and death, grumpy old man and flâneur.”

—New Pages

“A philosophical yet fast-paced tale filled with satisfyingly unexpected turns.”

—Booklist

“A worthwhile, thoughtful—and hilarious—read.”

—New York Journal of Books

“Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return is a masterpiece of metempsychosis.”

—Joshua Cohen

“One of our finest readers is now one of our most exciting novelists. . . . A funny, amiable, wholly original time-bender of a debut.”

—Ed Park

“By turns hilarious and tragic, Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return is a haunting and bizarre novel of twentieth-century television and other forsaken American landscapes.” 

—Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi

“Samuel Johnson’s demonstrates how beginning with a familiar object of interest (a quirky nineteenth-century novel, for instance) can lead—if followed rightly—to a site of novelty and abundance.”

—Gulf Coast

“A perfectly wondrous tale, wildly engaging from the start, so sure and graceful in the telling, so crazyhuman in the best ways. It is now one of my favorite books.” 

—Rikki Ducornet