Martin Riker Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Martin Riker is a successful published author.

He is known for his 2018 novel Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return. This book received favorable reviews from a number of places, including the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the New Yorker. This book was followed by The Guest Lecture, which was released in 2023.

Riker is not only an author but a literary critic. As a result, he has written about contemporary fiction and literature in translation for a variety of publications, including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, the Paris Review Daily, TLS, and The Guardian.

Martin has served for close to a decade as the Associate Director of Dalkey Archive Press, a nonprofit publishing house. He has also served as an editor for the periodicals The Review of Contemporary Fiction as well as CONTEXT: A Forum for Literary Arts and Culture.

In 2010, he and his wife co-founded the feminist publishing house that they called Dorothy. Dorothy has received international praise for its publication of innovative writers that include Marguerite Duras, Renee Gladman, and Leonora Carrington. It has also helped to launch the careers of such contemporary writers as Jen George, Nell Zink, and Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi.

Martin says that he grew up in central Pennsylvania. He has been working as a musician for the majority of his twenties, playing trombone and piano. But he eventually switched over his profession and moved from music to literature.

He has spent the majority of his thirties working in nonprofit literary publishing and got a PhD in the process. He continues to contribute criticism, interviews and reviews to publications and teaches courses in criticism, literature, and publishing in St. Louis as part of Washington University’s English Department.

Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return is a 2018 novel from Martin Riker. If you have been looking for something new and original to enjoy, check out this debut from a fresh voice in fiction and see what you think!

Samuel Johnson dies, but upon doing so, he discovers that he is trapped in the same body as the man who killed him. He cannot either leave this plane nor go back to the son that he has left behind. As each body expires, he moves to a different one.

In this way he is able to live a series of lives, some that are as stymied in many ways as his own. As he makes his way between women and men, through the young and through the old, he gives us a consideration of the ways that experience can be mediated, the drive that we all have to form human connections, and the ways that we struggle to be more alive in this world. Read Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return to find out everything that happens for yourself!

The Guest Lecture is a 2023 novel by Martin Riker. In the middle of the night in a hotel room, Abby is awake. The young feminist economist is awake next to her husband and daughter, who are soundly sleeping. She is worried that she is not prepared enough for a talk that she is putting on tomorrow that is based on optimism as well as John Maynard Keynes.

Abby has resolves to be able to practice by using an old rhetorical method of assigning parts of her speech to different rooms in her house. She’s also brought along Keynes himself in the form of an imaginary companion so that she can stay on track for her talk.

Abby wanders through the rooms of her own consciousness, but as she does so, she discovers that she is straying from the remarks that she had prepared on utopia, economic history, and Keynes’s pragmatic optimism.

Abby is something of a lapsed optimist as well, and has been trying to contend with the burden of supporting a family in an America that is increasingly hostile after she was turned down for tenure at the university she is an instructor at.

Dealing with her own future at a time of darkness all over the globe, Abby takes on a quest through her memories to various ideas that had been hidden in the corners of her mind as she wonders what a better world might be like if we were able to tell our stories with imaginations that are more honest and hopeful.

With curiosity and warm intellect, the author here brings this novel of ideas to life and transforms one woman’s crisis at midnight into what could be the performance of a lifetime. Check out The Guest Lecture to follow along with all of it for yourself and witness personally how great this second novel from Martin Riker is!