FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE 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 by The New York Times Book Review, NPR, Time, Elle, Vulture, Lit Hub, 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.
Rita Bullwinkel is the author of Belly Up, a story collection that won the Believer Book Award. The recipient of a 2022 Whiting Award, she has had her work published in Tin House, Conjunctions, BOMB Magazine, NOON, and Guernica. She is editor at large for McSweeney’s, the deputy editor of The Believer, and a contributing editor at NOON. She lives in San Francisco and teaches at the California College of the Arts and the University of San Francisco.
ISBN: 9780593654125 Format: Paperback Pages: 224 Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group Published: March 11, 2025
Longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Prize
Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize
Longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize
Finalist for the Golden Poppy Book Award
“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
