Stephen Florida
‘Powerful and magnetic’ Guardian
‘Mind blowing’ Roxane Gay
‘Explosive’ Hanya Yanagihara
‘Funny and disturbing’ Lauren Groff
Stephen Florida is a wrestler at Oregsburg College. His senior year means one thing: a final chance to win the Division IV Championship in the 133 weight class. But for Stephen Florida winning isn’t a goal, it’s an all-consuming fixation.
A literary tour de force, Stephen Florida is a character you will inhale, a mind you will inhabit in a masterful portrait of loneliness and unflinching ambition.
”'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