![]() Habash deftly unpacks the recurring anxieties of millennial masculinity. We learn that cool-as-a-cucumber Stephen is fleeing the horror of his parents’ accidental deaths and the loss of his beloved grandmother - and with those losses, any tethered connection to the wider social world. What begins as a study in Stephen’s take-no-prisoners approach to training and its related deprivations - limited food, a brutal physical regimen, occasional laxative therapy, no sex or masturbation - soon tips into a harrowing study of repression and the emotional and mental dissociative tendencies common to survivors of trauma. Orphaned and adrift, sleepwalking through his final year of college in a bleak North Dakota anytown, Stephen devotes his energy to one concrete goal: winning the regional wrestling championship. ![]() ![]() Consider the most obsessed person you’ve ever met, multiple that obsession a millionfold, and you get Stephen Florida, the eponymous hero of Gabe Habash’s gripping debut novel. ![]()
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