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by Chris Koslowski
At 26, Dom Contreras has already spent a decade jobbing through the minor leagues of professional wrestling as Hack Barlow, a 300-pound axe-swinging lumberjack.
As his body breaks down and his star power fades, he must invent a new gimmick before he loses the only job he's ever known. Meanwhile, Dom's 17-year-old sister Pilar is eager to make her own pro wrestling debut. Dom is determined to keep Pilar under his wing, away from the predators of a business infamous for eating its young. At the same time, he has a vision for her meteoric rise to the top--not just of his own outfit, the middling Mid-Coast Championship Wrestling promotion outside of Charlotte, but all the way to stardom (and a big payday) in the WWE. The siblings are close, spending much of their time packed into Dom's ancient Honda Civic en route to shows across the south, but as Dom craves privacy and Pilar reckons with her brother's conflicting roles of roommate, father figure, manager and coach, their relationship quickly begins to fray.
After Dom loses his temper in a match and Pilar injures herself preparing for her big tryout, Bonnie Blue, the eccentric owner of MCCW, spots an opportunity. She is poised, after years of scheming, to unveil her life's handiwork: an underground, guerrilla-style pro wrestling network with bouts climaxing in real, premeditated injury. To save his career--and his sister's hopes of breaking out--Dom must become Bonnie's new star and take on the one persona he swore he'd never embrace.
Kayfabe is a window into life on the fringes of a uniquely brutal American pastime and an intelligent, self-aware commentary on modern identity, artifice, and violence. In the vein of National Book Award finalist Chris Bachelder's The Throwback Special, Kayfabe explores the boundaries of sport, spectacle, entertainment, and exploitation. Like Kevin Wilson's The Family Fang, it centers a strange family seeking connection in an even stranger world. Evoking Sam Lipsyte's whip-smart humor and Lauren Oyler's biting insight, Kayfabe challenges readers to consider the truths that fakery can expose.
"[A] brisk and punchy debut. […] it's a winner." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"This is a love letter to showmanship with enough high stakes, insider trivia, and personal struggle to make it enormously readable. An unexpectedly tender ode to passing one's prime while also finding new joys in fostering next generation talent." ―Kirkus Reviews
"Kayfabe is a wonderfully immersive and ethnographically rich debut. Koslowski's approach to professional wrestlers and wrestling is not satirical but attentive, earnest, engaged. This is a terrific novel about American sport, American work." ―Chris Bachelder, author of The Throwback Special and Dayswork
"Chris Koslowski's Kayfabe lands with the force of a clothesline from the top turnbuckle. This is a novel that takes wrestling seriously, in all the best ways. Koslowski has reconfigured the great American office novel to fit the grunt employee whose cubicle is a brightly lit mat inside a ring, and who comes home from the job not figuratively but literally battered. A fast-paced, smart, quick-moving book, and a fabulous debut." ―Michael Griffith, author of The Speaking Stone and Trophy
"Robert Siegel's The Wrestler meets Chris Bachelder's Bear v. Shark in Chris Koslowski's disarming portrait of a vicious profession that either "eats you, or…spits you out." Crack the book for the wrestling; stay for Dom and Pilar's poignant brother-sister relationship. As these sibs exorcise their demons and reorganize each other's dreams, Kayfabe wrecks the reader, again and again, in painfully entertaining ways. This novel is a folding chair to the back of the head." ―David James Poissant, author of Lake Life and The Heaven of Animals
This information about Kayfabe was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
A University of Michigan graduate, Koslowski holds an MA in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Cincinnati and an MFA in Fiction from the University of South Carolina. His fiction has been published in Blue Mesa Review, Front Porch Journal, and Amazon's Day One. Koslowski lives with his wife in Columbia, South Carolina.
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