"Narrator Will Damron turns in a mesmerizing performance and, for better or worse, immerses listeners inside the twisted mind of Stephen Florida." —AudioFile

"Voice actor Damron treats the wrestling match descriptions like a professional announcer, adding color to performance and helping listeners stay attuned." —Publishers Weekly Audio Review

"Finely rendered, dark, and funny . . . A striking, original, and coarsely poetic portrayal of a young man’s athletic and emotional quest." —Publishers Weekly Starred Review

"Habash has created a fascinating protagonist in Stephen, a hard-driven athlete with a convincingly thoughtful mind — though an erratic one, too." —New York Times

"Stephen Florida is 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

"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

"I'm pinned to the mat by this one." —The Quivering Pen

"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

"In Gabe Habash’s wickedly good debut novel, we see a mind relentlessly seeking to bend the world to its will, thereby weeding out the real from the unreal and finding a place for itself in between the two." —Los Angeles Review of Books

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