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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 (dorothyproject.com). 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.
A Summer/Fall 2018 Indies Introduce Debut Fiction Selection John Donne once proclaimed, 'I sing the progress of a deathless soul.' Well, so does Martin Riker. His Samuel Johnson's Eternal Return is a masterpiece of metempsychosis. That it also warbles and bellows so brilliantly about fatherhood and husbandhood, about the religious life and the mediated life, is an indication of Riker's range, which is as rolling-field-expansive as his empathy. --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 After his violent death, Samuel Johnson inhabits multiple souls as he strives to reunite with his now orphaned young son. Traveling between dark humor, unfathomable tragedy, and tracing the history of television in America, Martin Riker's outstanding debut novel Samuel Johnson's Eternal Return illustrates how the human spirit can persevere. Caitlin Luce Baker, University Book Store (Seattle WA) Ambitious and memorable, deadly serious and unexpectedly comic, Samuel Johnson's Eternal Return is the ghost story you've been waiting for. Michael Hermann, Gibson's Bookstore (Concord NH)
