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Headshot

Written by: Rita Bullwinkel
Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
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Publisher's Summary

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE

FINALIST FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE

ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE READS OF SUMMER 2024

Named a Best Book of 2024 So Far by The New York Times Book Review, NPR, Elle, Vulture, and The Guardian

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

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
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What the critics say

“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)”

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Perfect book for napping

Headshot is the perfect book for napping. The over-the-top character descriptions enable one to listen for a while, then nap for a while, and wake up not having missed a dot of the plot. Because there is no plot. A brilliant book for readers who do not care if anything significant happens. As for the performance, the sip of breath the performer takes before almost every line gets distracting.

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