Stephen Florida

Local Description

slight damage - reduced

Description

'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 Foxcatcher meets The Art of Fielding. A coming-of-age story and a psychological journey into the mind of a young man teetering between genius and insanity. Stephen Florida is a college wrester in his senior season, fixated on winning his Championship fight: every practice, every match, is a step closer to greatness and a step further from reality. Profane, manic and tipping into the uncanny, this is his story of loneliness, obsession, and the drive to leave a mark.

Reviews

`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 `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 `Habash has a great eye for the ways in which our public identities and private insecurities are shaped by happenstance ... full of vim and invention, good jokes and built-up bodies, unexpected sentences' Paris Review Daily `Spellbinding' Toronto Star

Author description

Gabe Habash is the fiction reviews editor for Publishers Weekly. He holds an MFA from New York University and lives in New York.