Description
Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024
A Book of the Year for the New York Times, Guardian, Telegraph and The Times
Headshot is the story of the eight best teenage girl boxers in the United States, told over the two days of a championship tournament and structured as a series of face-offs. As the girls’ pasts and futures collide, the specific joy and violence of the sport comes to life with electric energy, and a portrait emerges of the desire, envy, perfectionism, madness and sheer physical pleasure that motivates each of these young women to fight.
This is a novel about the radicalness and strangeness of being physically intimate with another human when you are measuring your own body, through competition, against theirs. What does the intimacy of a physical competition feel like? What does it mean to walk through life in the bodies we’ve been given, and what does it mean to use those bodies with abandon?
Funny, propulsive, obsessive and ecstatic, Headshot is equal parts subtle and intense, as it brings us to the sidelines of the ring and above and beyond it, examining closely the eight girls’ lives, which intersect for a moment – a universe that shimmers and resonates.
‘‘An absolute knock-out . . . its visceral, skilful prose grips from first to last . . . Excellent.’ Declan Ryan, Daily Telegraph 5*
‘ Bullwinkel’s writing is as poignant and visceral as the sport demands, her words inhabiting the thoughts and bodies of her characters . . . Beauty, brutality and the sheer banality of violence combine.’ Benjamin Myers, Guardian
‘Headshot is a shock and a fever-dream and a fury of a novel. It's controlled violence and uncontrolled ambitions, coming-of-age and coming-into-self, motels and warehouses and future visions and weird little raccoon tail hats. It's everything you want from a novel about a teenage girls' boxing championship, and a whole lot more. I loved it.’ Jon McGregor
About the Author
Rita Bullwinkel is the author of the novel Headshot (2024) and the short-story collection Belly Up, which won a 2022 Whiting Award. Her writing has been published in the White Review, BOMB, NOON and Guernica, among others. She is a recipient of grants and fellowships from MacDowell, Brown University, Vanderbilt University, Hawthornden Castle and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. Both her fiction and translation have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. She is an Editor at Large for McSweeney’s, the Deputy Editor of The Believer, a Contributing Editor for NOON, and the creator of Oral Florist. She is an Assistant Professor of English at University of San Francisco.
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