10 Islands

Jared Joseph

March 5, 2026

A juicy, idiotically thorough chronicle of one of the more important deli sandwiches. Joseph is a master eater, and a fun storyteller.

—Noah Rinsky, author of the best selling book, The Old Jewish Men’s Guide to Eating, Sleeping and Futzing Around

To claim that Ten Islands is “reuben-centric” is only half-right. It is true that the series unfolds a cosmos in the same way that God unfolded the order of the world to Moses on Mt. Sinai. Only, the center of that unfolding cosmos is not the reuben itself but actually the relationship between man and reuben, which is a void. This is important in the ultimate direction of each island. Back in 1927 physicists had not figured out how to split the atom yet, and Werner Heisenberg made the situation worse for proving that the basis of particle physics is uncertainty— that uncertainty is actually fundamental. Save mountaintop revelation, we cannot determine the  electron’s speed at the same time as its location within the pull of the atom’s electron shell. In Ten Islands each reuben eaten here reads like a Heisenberg proof: Will the reuben have a pickle? Will the writer be trapped inside or outside of the reuben’s black existential shell? We can discover one, but never both.

— Allen Wilson, author of Early Christian and Greco-Roman Conceptions of Blood Difference

The generosity of Jared Joseph’s work always stuns me. His eye capably renders endless textures of humanity (perjorative) and humanity (endearment) in even the humblest arena of marbled rye and short-order counters. He does both simultaneously, in fact, which is how you can recognize the dignity of truth in this cataloguing of reubens transcendent and mid alike. “The text from this marketing chatbot is 1000 times tenderer than this corned beef burn victim,” he writes. “You can be in a cold room and not feel cold.” You probably won’t believe me if I say that reading Ten Islands will return you to your world with a fondness for its shitty parking lots and a willingness to love being alive. It sounds like a tall order (oho!) but it’s the truth. 

—Sarah Elaine Smith, author of Marilou is Everywhere and I Live in a Hut

When Jared Joseph DM’ed me and said “Would you blurb my chapbook? It’s about eating 1000 reubens,” a joyous bark escaped my lips. THIS IS ART I thought, and immediately said yes. Later that night, I ran into a mutual friend, the poet Adam Stutz, at a reading and mentioned Jared’s book. “He texted me about it,” said Adam (I’m paraphrasing). “He’s in good shape, but I’m worried about him eating all those reubens. He’s incredibly dedicated, though, like he is with everything, and it will be amazing.” I agreed that it was somewhat dangerous to eat that many reubens, and that for Jared, eating all those reubens was inevitable. Upon reading the book, which Jared sent me as a pdf to my gmail along with the note “(still not fully edited)”, I was transported back to the projects of my youth: furtively drawing weird photos of every person at the public swimming pool for an entire summer, squishing seed pods under the tires of cars and collecting them up in my Radio Flyer. “What is the reuben, and what is its immanence?” writes Jared in one of the many footnotes that are one of the reuben’s forms. Miraculously, he has managed to smuggle the source into our current fucked reality with a wry and dedicated appetite. Political, propulsive, and brilliant even in its mundanity, hilarious even in its aggression, in its fine gross detail noticing, like all Jared’s work, Ten Islands bursts the bounds of its form like sauerkraut spilling out the sides of the reuben and captures something wonderfully specific and “of course I want a pickle” about what it is to be an artist and a human in our decaying capitalist shithole Trumpian nightmare. As I moved through the reubens, a feeling of virtuosity came over me – It’s not over until the last reuben is eaten, pickle and all, I thought, and, really, suggests this ultimately life affirming work – not even then.

—Kate Durbin

About the author

Jared Joseph is boring.