Description: A troubled college wrestler in North Dakota falls in love and becomes increasingly unhinged during his final season.
Foxcatcher meets The Art of Fielding, Stephen Florida follows a college wrestler in his senior season, when every practice, every match, is a step closer to greatness and a step further from sanity. Profane, manic, and tipping into the uncanny, it's a story of loneliness, obsession, and the drive to leave a mark.Review Quotes: Praise for Stephen Florida
Finalist for the 2017 Young Lions Fiction AwardFinalist for the 2017 Clark Fiction Prize "What a strange, strange, utterly intriguing novel. . . . Writing like this takes guts." --Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist "Funny, compelling and weird. None of us could put [Stephen Florida] down." --Judy Blume "Habash has created a fascinating protagonist in Stephen, a hard-driven athlete with a convincingly thoughtful mind." --The New York Times Sunday Book Review "A striking, original, and coarsely poetic portrayal of a young man's athletic and emotional quest." --Publishers Weekly, starred review "[Habash's] writing is 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 that the greatest sportspeople, in a ring, on a court or on a pitch, can achieve." --The Guardian "Stephen Florida's grim portrait of ambition led astray captures how competitiveness and masculinity can unravel those who blindly follow its codes." --The Atlantic "Stephen Florida is full of vim and invention, good jokes and built-up bodies, unexpected sentences." --The Paris Review Daily "Stephen Florida is an obsession, but not just with wrestling--he is the taut, erratic, boundless contradiction of what it means to be alive." --Los Angeles Review of Books "I never thought I could love a book about a straight male protagonist so much (especially one named after my home state), but here we are!" --Kristen Arnett, Elle "Stephen Florida is brash and audacious; it's not just one of the best novels of the year, it's one of the best sports books to come along in quite a while." --NPR "For the person who wants sentences tight as rope, as tendons, as muscles, and just as sinuous." --Nylon "Habash describes his protagonist's bouts with brio and expertise. He also conveys the young man's single-minded obsession powerfully, even poetically." --The Star Tribune "[Stephen Florida is] a dark and twisty tale of ambition: ambition in overdrive, ambition that hauls its dark heavy tarp over everything else in your life." --Vol. 1 Brooklyn "Habash's debut is a memorable portrait of obsession to the edge of madness and the loneliness that follows so single-minded a pursuit." --Library Journal, starred review "Stephen Florida is relentlessly inventive, utterly unyielding to expectation, and there's not a dull line in the thing." --Bookforum "The reader comes to know [Stephen's] every interior thought, even through injury, manipulation and his ill-fated forays into emotions beyond the wrestling mat." --MPR "With darkly funny and electric, affecting prose, Habash has created an oddball for the ages. Stephen Florida is not to be missed." --BuzzFeed "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 "Stephen Florida is an unforgettable addition to the canon of great literary eccentrics." --Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You "The compelling voice of this book drew me in right away, and it wasn't long before this character was a real person to me, and someone who I found myself loving and rooting for." --Dan Chaon, author of Ill Will