SEPTEMBER 2017 - AudioFile
Narrator Will Damron turns in a mesmerizing performance and, for better or worse, immerses listeners inside the twisted mind of Stephen Florida. Stephen’s senior year at a small North Dakota college marks his final chance at a wrestling championship, a goal he pursues with frightening intensity as he also comes to terms with the uncertainties of post-college life. Damron doesn’t strain to make Stephen likable; instead he delivers the stream-of-consciousness narrative with such openness that he seems to revel in Stephen’s darkness and physicality. This is top-notch narration, even if the bizarre and disjointed story isn’t for everyone. A.T.N. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
The New York Times Book Review - Jonathan Russell Clark
Stephen Florida is not some Hollywood sports story. First, Stephen's drive is reinforced or curated not by his coaches but by himself, and second, the novel doesn't present his grandiose ambitions and unrepentant will as heroic or necessary or even good. Rather, it tries to understand the kind of person who would be attracted to such a vocation in the first place…Habash has created a fascinating protagonist in Stephen, a hard-driven athlete with a convincingly thoughtful mind—though an erratic one, too. Just when you think you've got Stephen pegged, he surprises you…But most important, I think, is the way Habash understands the limits of his subject matter. He does not try to extrapolate Stephen's narrative into some all-encompassing portrayal of ambition and hubris, but remains firmly in the realm of this particular boy in this particular moment.
Publishers Weekly - Audio
07/31/2017
This debut novel by PW deputy reviews editor Habash unfolds mostly in the mind of the title character, a Division IX college wrestler who is entering his senior year at a community college in the fictional town of Aiken, N.Dak. Stephen is an odd, angry young man, an orphan raised by his grandmother, totally obsessed with winning wrestling trophies and with the sexual satisfaction denied him by his wrestling coach’s rules. For the audiobook, voice actor Damron treats the wrestling match descriptions like a professional announcer, adding color to performance and helping listeners stay attuned. He channels Stephen’s anger, anguish, and soul-searching and gives character to Stephen’s few acquaintances, like a college professor who may have murdered his wife, a coach who’s generally off the wall, and his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Mary Beth. For the most part, it’s a straightforward listening experience that relies on the strength of Habash’s prose. A Coffee House hardcover. (June)
Publishers Weekly
★ 03/27/2017
PW reviews editor Habash’s finely rendered, dark, and funny debut novel follows Steven Forster (known as Stephen Florida, due to an enduring clerical error) as he wrestles for Oregsburg College in Aiken, North Dakota. A senior, it’s his last season to win the championship, a goal on which he’s obsessively staked everything. But his turbulent friendship with a talented younger teammate, his budding romance with an aspiring gallery director, his lingering grief over his parents’ death, a hostile coach, and a possibly homicidal professor all threaten to distract and derail him. He must also face his demons: a lack of direction, a deep intolerance for boredom, a reckless despair that verges into suicidal ideation, and a loneliness so vast it becomes a potent feature of the dramatic landscape. The student-athlete’s world comes alive with crisp, unflinching prose: “Suicide sprints, jump rope, rope climbing, five times, arms only... I brush the vomit out of my teeth and get my backpack.” Habash also balances his protagonist’s most harrowing episodes and questionable behavior with genuine humor. There are riffs on everything from death to jazz to God to liberal arts degrees. A striking, original, and coarsely poetic portrayal of a young man’s athletic and emotional quest. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Associates. (June)
From the Publisher
Finalist for the 2018 Young Lions Fiction AwardFinalist for the Clark Fiction Prize
“What a strange, strange, utterly intriguing novel… Writing like this takes guts." —Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist
“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, boxed and 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
“Habash writes about the raw physicality of wrestling better than anybody this side of John Irving. . . . A lively, occasionally harrowing journey into obsession.” —Kirkus
“Stephen Florida’s grim portrait of ambition led astray captures how competitiveness and masculinity can unravel those who blindly follow its codes.” —The Atlantic“The execution of this novel is flawless. So many very good books are very good but unoriginal. This book is excellent and truly original.” —Roxane Gay
"Habash has a great eye for the ways in which our public identities and private insecurities are shaped by happenstance. Stephen Florida is full of vim and invention, good jokes and built-up bodies, unexpected sentences." —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! Gabe absolutely proved me wrong. This book is incredible.” —Kristen Arnett, Elle“An early candidate for BEST COVER OF THE YEAR AND MAYBE ALL TIME, Gabe Habash’s debut novel of love, obsession, and wrestling is yet another compelling reason to avoid college sports.” —Literary Hub
“In this novel, wrestling is really a pretext to introduce us to a powerful and engrossing new consciousness—Stephen’s struggle is to come to grips with the grinding willfulness that both enables and hobbles everything he does. Plus, Habash’s prose is dryly hilarious.” —Publishers Weekly
“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. It's an accomplishment that's made all the more stunning by Habash's status as a debut novelist: It's his first time on the mat, and he puts on a clinic.” —NPR
“The prose is dizzyingly good.” —Huffington Post
“In this burningly, bitterly funny tale of college student Stephen, who throws himself into wrestling to face down his fears… Habash effectively relates the raw physicality of wrestling and the raw emotions of growing up.” —Library Journal
“For the person who wants sentences tight as rope, as tendons, as muscles, and just as sinuous.” —Nylon
“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“Habash describes his protagonist’s bouts with brio and expertise. He also conveys the young man’s single-minded obsession powerfully, even poetically.” —Star Tribune
“Stephen Florida is relentlessly inventive, utterly unyielding to expectation, and there’s not a dull line in the thing.” —Bookforum
“I'm pinned to the mat by this one.” —The Quivering Pen
“[Stephen Florida] reads as a confessional — like a diary that’s had its lock ripped off of it and the pages written in blood.” —Electric Literature
“[Stephen is] fixated on his last chance to win the state championship, and the true pleasure of the novel is the revelation of Stephen’s interior life as contrasted with the regimented, joyless routine of his exterior one. This is a fantastic book, starring one of the most fully-fleshed characters you’ll meet this summer.” —Barnes & Noble Reads
“Dark, engrossing, and unendingly weird, Stephen Florida is a tribute to the beauty and terror of obsessive madness.” —Necessary Fiction
“A statement on the finality and undisputed nature of playoff results as well as a commentary on how we narrate.” —The Athletic
“Gabe Habash’s brand new novel Stephen Florida puts you in a literary headlock and holds you there until you like it.” —Maudlin House
Library Journal
★ 04/15/2017
Stephen Florida wrestles for tiny Oregsburg College in North Dakota. The loss of his parents has left him lonely and guarded. His obsession with wrestling becomes a way of trying to control one of the few things he can, and the hard work he puts toward realizing his desire propels him to a level almost beyond his talents. His only distraction during senior year is Mary Beth, a young woman he meets in art class, who falls for him as hard as he falls for her and who unfortunately leaves for Michigan partway through the year to take a job at a gallery. A late-season knee injury will sideline Stephen until just before the national championship and cause additional concern when he reinjures it before the tournament. VERDICT Habash's debut is a memorable portrait of obsession to the edge of madness and the loneliness that follows so single-minded a pursuit. Yet readers will gladly accompany the complex, thoughtful, not-always-likable Stephen through the season as he battles his own dark fears as much as any opponent.—Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA
SEPTEMBER 2017 - AudioFile
Narrator Will Damron turns in a mesmerizing performance and, for better or worse, immerses listeners inside the twisted mind of Stephen Florida. Stephen’s senior year at a small North Dakota college marks his final chance at a wrestling championship, a goal he pursues with frightening intensity as he also comes to terms with the uncertainties of post-college life. Damron doesn’t strain to make Stephen likable; instead he delivers the stream-of-consciousness narrative with such openness that he seems to revel in Stephen’s darkness and physicality. This is top-notch narration, even if the bizarre and disjointed story isn’t for everyone. A.T.N. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2017-03-21
A college wrestler is driven to win, to the detriment of his mental health.The captivating narrator of Habash's debut novel is a sinewy senior at a small North Dakota college on a last-ditch effort to win the Division IV championship in his weight class. To do so, he takes easy-A classes ("Drawing II, Meteorology I, Basic News Writing, and What Is Nothing?") and works out like a fiend ("I'm skin and gristle and little water"). But it's clear early on that something is off. He mentions his childhood as an orphan only to deny its impact, and his macho rhetoric takes bizarre turns: "It's my job to make other people upset and sad," "Everything outside of wrestling is devoid of mystery and deep faith," "Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha." In short, Stephen is a classic unreliable narrator, which makes him as fascinating to experience—Habash plainly glories in his hero's digressions and non sequiturs—as he is difficult to root for. He's a bully with opponents, alienating with his teammates, and clumsy in a budding relationship. Once a meniscus tear threatens to keep him out of competition, his angry, obsessive nature ("I gargle discontent") drives him to investigate dark rumors about coaches and teachers. That's a canny provocation to the reader: recognize he's unhinged or respect his sense of justice? Either way, Habash writes about the raw physicality of wrestling better than anybody this side of John Irving ("I push his far shoulder like I'm crowbarring open Tut's tomb or I'm Lazarus moving aside the rock for the big reunion"), and though the story is overlong given Stephen's straightforward trajectory, the novel's grim, intense mood is admirably sustained. For this well-intentioned but troubled man, every victory is a pyrrhic one. A lively, occasionally harrowing journey into obsession.
