Stephen Florida
‘Powerful and magnetic’ Guardian
‘Mind blowing’ Roxane Gay
‘Explosive’ Hanya Yanagihara
‘Funny and disturbing’ Lauren Groff
Meet Stephen Florida: college student, amateur wrestler, visionary, outsider.
Entering senior year, his sights are set on the championships. Every practice, every match, is a step closer to greatness, yet also a step further from reality. Profane, manic and tipping into the uncanny, this is Florida’s chronicle of loneliness, obsession, and the drive to leave a mark.
With echoes of The Art of Fielding and the film Foxcatcher, Gabe Habash’s daring, revelatory debut journeys into the mind of a young man teetering between control and rage, grief and elation, genius and insanity.
”'Powerful and magnetic, with a quality that suggests it has been worked over to strip it bare of ornamentation but still leave it with a rare beauty” - Guardian
”'Mind blowing” - Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist
”'A coming-of-age story with its own, often explosive, rhythm and velocity … This is a shape-shifter of a book, both a dark ode to the mysteries and landscapes of the American West and a complex and convincing character study” - Hanya Yanagihara, author of A Little Life
”'Such a funny and disturbing and excellent book” - Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies
”'Excellent … Gabe Habash takes us deep inside the disordered mind of a college wrestler. Welcome to the hall of fame of unreliable narrators” - BuzzFeed
”'An unforgettable addition to the canon of great literary eccentrics. At once a chronicle of obsession, a philosophical treatise, and a deeply affecting love story, this singular novel is perhaps most profoundly an anatomy of American loneliness. Gabe Habash is a writer of powerful gifts, and this is a wonderful book” - Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You
”'Utterly engrossing” - Dan Chaon, author of Ill Will
”'Habash has created a fascinating protagonist in Stephen, a hard-driven athlete with a convincingly thoughtful mind … Just when you think you’ve got [him] pegged, he surprises you” - The New York Times Book Review
”'Dizzyingly good” - Huffington Post
”'Habash writes about the raw physicality of wrestling better than anybody this side of John Irving… A lively, occasionally harrowing journey into obsession” - Kirkus
”'Wickedly good … exquisite … [Stephen Florida] is the taught, erratic, boundless contradiction of what it means to be alive” - Los Angeles Review of Books
”'One of the most unforgettable characters in recent American fiction … starkly beautiful and moving … one of the best novels of the year” - NPR
”'Spellbinding” - Toronto Star