Finalist for the 2017 Young Lions Fiction Award
Finalist 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
