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Headshot is an extraordinary act of literary telepathy. With prose as muscular and gleaming as a body in motion, Bullwinkel drops readers into that roaring, incandescent universe that is young womanhood. This is a book with its own pulse.” ―C Pam Zhang, author of Land of Milk and Honey and How Much of These Hills Is Gold
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Headshot is just that―a shot to the head, a cumulative wallop to the senses. Bullwinkel's prose jabs, spars, feints, floats, stings, and slowly floods us with the force of the fact: time and will can make the dust of an ordinary life sparkle.” ―Namwali Serpell, author of The Furrows
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The genius that is Rita Bullwinkel has finally handed us this brilliant, perfect novel, and it is everything you hoped for; it is as devastating and inventive and philosophical and playful as you could imagine. I dreamed of it for days after I finished it. I dreamed of those girls’ punches and their swirling minds.” ―Deb Olin Unferth, author of Barn 8
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Headshot is a knockout, a novel as fierce and vibrant as its girl boxers. I’ve never read a book like this, that captures girlhood and life itself in the fleeting moments that make us.” ―Rachel Khong, author of Real Americans and Goodbye, Vitamin
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Rita Bullwinkel's Headshot is a powerfully compelling and evocative look at the lives of girl boxers, told in a style of beauty and concision. I loved it.” ―Brandon Hobson, author of The Removed
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A true portrait of life as a young girl boxer. The accuracy with which Bullwinkel depicts thinking while competing in a boxing match is excellent.” ―Ginny Fuchs, American Olympic Boxer and four-time National Champion
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Brilliant Bullwinkel brings us inside the bodies of the best girl boxers in America. Here, in the head of a fighter, pasts and futures explode from fists to insist on the present. What is it to stand in opposition to another? What troubles and thoughts power each punch? Bullwinkel, like the finest of fighters, wields grace and vision, a most powerful hit.” ―Samantha Hunt, author of The Dark Dark
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Headshot is a kinetic, suspenseful portrait of eight girl boxers locked in ferocious competition for the Daughters of America Cup. In the steaming depths of Bob’s Boxing Palace, these fighters must face each other and the wild thunder of their own inner worlds. Rita Bullwinkel is brilliant on the physical collision, at once strategic and feral, that is a boxing match, and the private hopes and agonies that compel fighters to step through the ropes.” ―Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel
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As blazing and distinctive a performance as I’ve beheld in a long while. Bullwinkel’s figurative language is tethered at one end to the distant galaxies, at the other to the cellular structure of her young fighters’ bodies. Whole lives are strung between. I’m amazed.” ―Jonathan Lethem, author of Brooklyn Crime Novel and Motherless Brooklyn
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A luminously unsentimental, tour-de-force exploration of competition and its consequences―which is to say, of the America we all live in. Headshot is literature at its vital, primal best.” ―John Wray, author of Gone to the Wolves
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A true portrait of life as a young girl boxer. The accuracy with which Bullwinkel depicts thinking while competing in a boxing match is excellent.” ―Ginny Fuchs, American Olympic boxer and four-time National Champion
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The classic momentum of a sports narrative unfurls in unusually lyric and muscular language: a ferocious novel . . . unusual and striking . . . Each match unfolds both in the physicality of the dusty ring and in the consciousnesses of the fighters, their coaches, parents, and other spectators in the tiny audience. There’s not a single line of dialogue in the book, but rather a hypnotically intense, God’s-eye narrative voice . . . For each young woman, Bullwinkel also conjures a life ahead, and these brilliantly imagined future selves add to the richness of the characterizations.” ―Kirkus Reviews (starred)
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Sensational . . . Bullwinkel lit the scene on fire with her debut story collection Belly Up and returns with a first novel that is a stone-cold stunner.” ―Debutiful
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[A] smashing debut novel . . . For all the toe-to-toe realism and visceral descriptions of the girls’ blood sport, Bullwinkel’s real interest is in their inner lives and the picture that forms when considered as a whole . . . The fragile lives of her weekend warriors are faithfully portrayed in prose that is intelligible but never commonplace, virtuosic yet grounded. Bullwinkel’s knockout performance mops the floor with rank pretenders.” ―Publishers Weekly (starred)
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Wickedly sharp and original, Rita Bullwinkel’s striking debut upends the genre in this portrait of eight teenage girl boxers.
— NYLON
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[Bullwinkel's] prose is direct, deft, and tough, but not without grace and emotion . . . Bullwinkel renders the intricacies of adolescent girlhood in such a way that cannot fail to give readers sharp jolts of recognition.
— Another Magazine