The Last Words of Jack Ruby

Who was Jack Ruby? Why did he kill Lee Harvey Oswald? And why, on his deathbed, does he insist on recounting the story of his lifelong friendship with the boxer, war hero, gun runner, and drug addict Barney Ross?

A historical novel inspired by the real-life friendship between my cousin Barney and the man some have called “the accidental assassin,” The Last Words of Jack Ruby follows Jack and Barney from Prohibition Chicago’s Jewish ghetto to the blood-soaked jungles of Gudalcanal to the Carousel Club in Dallas. Along the way, one man’s violence made him a hero while the other’s made him infamous. A delirious noir investigation of the paranoid heart of the American Dream.

Coming on November 24, 2026—the 63rd anniversary of the day Ruby shot Oswald—from Chicago’s own Tortoise Books. Pre-order at Bookshop.org, or ask your local bookstore to order your copy today.

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The Last Words of Jack Ruby feels like a rare throwback to the great Jewish American books of the 1950s and ’60s—those works where ordinary shlubs from tough immigrant upbringings find themselves entangled in epic reckonings that are at once personal, national, and historical. Wonderfully old-world, yet unmistakably modern, the book fuses the psychological richness of Bellow and the sweeping and faithful historical imagination of Doctorow. Joshua Corey has written a great American novel, a great Jewish American novel, and a great novel about the lifelong friendship between a success and the shlub who never quite catches up. —Avner Landes

“Even though you know what you did, it operates against you somehow,” Jack Ruby said in 1964 to members of the Warren Commission investigating his murder of alleged JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. “You are weak in what you want to tell the truth about.” Joshua Corey’s The Last Words of Jack Ruby is as much Ruby’s story as it is ours—its truths emerge from the distinctly violent American mythologies that Ruby hung his worn-out fedora on. Corey’s Ruby is neither brute nor savior, but he’s dying to be both. He’s a pure product of American violence in all of its brawling, hotheaded insecurity. In this impeccably researched and riveting novel, Corey explores the ideologies and obsessions that shape so many of us—the true stories we often tell to evade the truth, and the unfulfilled desires that can destroy us. —Tony Trigilio