Headshot

A Novel

De: Rita Bullwinkel

Narrado por: Cassandra Campbell

Duración: 5 h y 24 m

Resumen del Editor

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by The Washington Post, NYLON, Lit Hub, The Millions, The Rumpus, and more

A March 2024 Indie Next Pick

“Make room, American fiction, for a meaningful new voice.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review

“As blazing and distinctive a performance as I’ve beheld in a long while . . . I’m amazed.”—Jonathan Lethem

An electrifying debut novel from an “unusually gifted writer” (Lorrie Moore) about the radical intimacy of physical competition

An unexpected tragedy at a community pool. A family’s unrelenting expectation of victory. The desire to gain or lose control; to make time speed up or stop; to be frighteningly, undeniably good at something. Each of the eight teenage girl boxers in this blistering debut novel has her own reasons for the sacrifices she has made to come to Reno, Nevada, to compete to be named the best in the country. Through a series of face-offs that are raw, ecstatic, and punctuated by flashes of humor and tenderness, prizewinning writer Rita Bullwinkel animates the competitors’ pasts and futures as they summon the emotion, imagination, and force of will required to win.

Frenetic, surprising, and strikingly original, Headshot is a portrait of the desire, envy, perfectionism, madness, and sheer physical pleasure that motivate young women to fight—even, and perhaps especially, when no one else is watching.

©2024 Rita Bullwinkel (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

“Make room, American fiction, for a meaningful new voice. . . . Whatever [Bullwinkel] turns her attention to glows under her scrutiny. . . . This is kinetic writing, but it would mean little without this novel’s undertow of human feeling and the rapt attention it pays to life’s bottom dogs, young women who are short on sophistication but long on motivation. . . . [Headshot is] fresh and strong and sinuous . . . so enveloping to read that you feel, at times, that you are writing it in your own mind. It contains no bogus psychologizing. Its wide-awake characters put me in mind of the singer Ian Dury’s immortal comment: ‘I’m not here to be remembered, I’m here to be alive.’”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review

“Movement between graceful meditation and descriptions of fighting allows for both a dignified and a critical treatment of boxing. . . . Ideas are made particular with metaphor and strange details, which expand time poetically in each scene. . . . Eight two-minute rounds can contain a lot, it turns out.”—The Washington Post

“Bullwinkel’s debut novel is as tense and disciplined as its characters, and she has a gift for capturing the way their minds wander far from the ring and back again. . . . There’s a mesmerizing sense of limitlessness to the narrative, which roams far into the future of these fighters even as they’re absorbing hits in the ring.”—Vulture, “The Best Books of 2024 (So Far)”

Didn’t grab me

It’s not badly written I just couldn’t get into it and I think it repeated too much.

Terrible Book

I hate being critical of someone’s work, but in this situation I just had to recommend that everyone avoid this nonsense. Poorly written and devoid of any plot this was just a waste of time.