...[a] powerhouse debut ... one of the most unforgettable characters in recent American fiction ... It's hard to pull off a novel with an unreliable narrator, and they don't come much more unreliable than Stephen. But Habash manages to make his protagonist both charismatic and repelling, frequently on the same page, and the result is one of the most fascinating characters to come along in quite a while ... In the end, it's difficult not to root for Stephen, despite his impulsiveness and stubborn single-mindedness. And it's almost impossible not to admire Habash's starkly beautiful and moving novel. Stephen Florida is brash and audacious; it's not just one of the best novels of the year, it's one of the best sports books to come along in quite a while.

...[a] gripping debut novel ... Habash deftly unpacks the recurring anxieties of millennial masculinity. Stephen’s physical grappling becomes an exquisite and complicated metaphor for the emotional and existential struggle of so many young North American men ... Much of the novel’s tension lies in grim uncertainties and Habash is gifted in his ability to imbue even the most mundane scene with nuance and muted suspense ... Despite its contemporary sensibility, the cryptic absence of technology — no smart phones, computers, social media, or texting — imbues the tale with a noirish, Twin Peaks feel ... A spellbinding coming-of-age novel, Stephen Florida is not the kind of book content with clean plot lines or loose ends tied up neatly. Instead, it’s a deeply satisfying peek into the mind and heart of a troubled young man trying desperately to rein in the chaotic and multiplying forces of a world he cannot control.

Habash questions not only the true cost of achieving athletic greatness, but also how masculinity—defined in part by vengefulness, violence, and stoicism—can drive men to behave in self-glorifying and self-defeating ways ... It reads a bit like Chad Harbach’s coming-of-age story The Art of Fielding invaded by the characters from Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, a novel obsessed with the absurd nature of manhood. But unlike Bolaño’s novel, Stephen Florida refuses to romanticize its male characters and their exploits, instead exposing the emptiness of their hunger for recognition ... Impressively, Habash traces Stephen’s increasing derangement without resorting to clichés. The novel is both funny and authentically creepy, and even as his mental health and relationships deteriorate, Stephen remains consistently surprising, accessible, and engaging. Stephen Florida’s grim portrait of ambition led astray captures how competitiveness and masculinity can unravel those who blindly follow its codes. In Habash’s world, to man up is to break down. The growing number of stories about real-life athletes suffering similar crises has made that idea especially—and regrettably—timely.

Habash has created a fascinating protagonist in Stephen, a hard-driven athlete with a convincingly thoughtful mind — though an erratic one, too. Just when you think you’ve got Stephen pegged, he surprises you ... But most important, I think, is the way Habash understands the limits of his subject matter. He does not try to extrapolate Stephen’s narrative into some all-encompassing portrayal of ambition and hubris, but remains firmly in the realm of this particular boy in this particular moment.

Stephen Florida is hard to classify. Yes, it’s an intense character study, but it’s also a fierce and ambitious horror novel, exploring the very real dangers we try to keep at bay in so many of our seemingly harmless obsessions. There are scenes so remarkably dark that I had to put the book away. There’s anger in these pages?—?and there’s pain. The atmosphere, cold but simultaneously sweaty, makes everything click with a steady, yet animalistic precision. Some readers might argue that Habash’s debut is overlong or overripe with intensity. Perhaps it is, but the raw grittiness contained in these pages is part of what makes the book feel so accomplished. Gabe Habash’s Stephen Florida is dizzying, dazzling, and, ultimately, divine.

...he’s arch, that’s for sure. Unfortunately, in this debut novel by Gabe Habash, that’s one of Stephen’s few arresting traits. The chief attribute with which Habash endows Stephen is self-absorption. And that will rarely beguile a reader ... Habash describes his protagonist’s bouts with brio and expertise. He also conveys the young man’s single-minded obsession powerfully, even poetically ... In the end, his histrionics amount to very little, and you’re left wondering why Habash doesn’t have Stephen’s enforced non-wrestling (and girlfriendless) phase unhinge him and finally ignite the tepid story ... a bit of action on his part — the more drastic the better — would have gone a long way toward making him more exciting. It would also have contributed to turning Habash’s novel into something more dynamic than a character study of a brooding and occasionally droll young man.

Stephen is a classic unreliable narrator, which makes him as fascinating to experience—Habash plainly glories in his hero’s digressions and non sequiturs—as he is difficult to root for ... Habash writes about the raw physicality of wrestling better than anybody this side of John Irving, and though the story is overlong given Stephen’s straightforward trajectory, the novel’s grim, intense mood is admirably sustained. For this well-intentioned but troubled man, every victory is a pyrrhic one. A lively, occasionally harrowing journey into obsession.

50 pages into Stephen Florida I felt as though I was being pinned to a wall – or rather a mat – by a teenage boy intent on telling me every detail of his exercise routine, about the importance of warm-ups, protein and sleep and the reason he keeps his hair in a military buzz cut. Eventually, though, I gave in, seduced by his unrelenting determination, despite the fact that he was holding me down and twisting my arm into places nature did not want it to go … Its brutal intensity makes it a difficult read at times, but there’s no denying how deeply Stephen’s voice sinks into the mind ... His writing is powerful and magnetic, with a quality that suggests it has been worked over to strip it bare of ornamentation but still leave it with a rare beauty that the greatest sportspeople, in a ring, on a court or on a pitch, can achieve.

...[a] finely rendered, dark, and funny debut ... The student-athlete’s world comes alive with crisp, unflinching prose ... Habash also balances his protagonist’s most harrowing episodes and questionable behavior with genuine humor. There are riffs on everything from death to jazz to God to liberal arts degrees. A striking, original, and coarsely poetic portrayal of a young man’s athletic and emotional quest.