Headshot

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Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by The Washington Post, NYLON, Lit Hub, The Millions, The Rumpus, and more

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 motivates young women to fight—even, and perhaps especially, when no one else is watching.Advance praise for Headshot:

“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, New York Times Book Review

“Fierce and muscular, a showcase of the author’s singular prose style.” —San Francisco Chronicle, Datebook

“Headshot is completely brilliant. A fierce and intimate account of eight fascinating young women with powerful, refined prose. Rita Bullwinkel puts you inside the minds of her characters while enthralling you as the story plays out.” —March 2024 Indie Next List

“Wickedly sharp and original, Rita Bullwinkel’s striking debut upends the genre in this portrait of eight teenage girl boxers.” —NYLON

“Bullwinkel’s 2018 short story collection Belly Up wasn’t afraid of bewildering its readers. Her first novel is even more brazen, testing the boundaries of what a novel can even be while refusing to hold back a single, brutal punch… The timeline spans just the two days… but the story itself is cavernous, spreading across time and space, expanding into profound experiences of love, grief, girlhood, and ambition, and how these experiences interplay with the power and catharsis of physical pain. It’s awe-inspiring and incomparable.”  —Bustle

“For those of us whose hands still remember the choreography of the games we once played, Headshot is a fearless and faithful rendering of what it’s like to inhabit the secret world of girls—the disorientation, the violence, the delusions of grandeur, the simultaneous intimacy with and alienation from one another—through the eyes of eight competitors at the very edge of girlhood, playing the last hand-clapping game of their lives.” —The Brooklyn Rail

“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)

“[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)

“Bullwinkel’s dingy, fishbowl-like, time-forgotten setting puts readers ringside… This is a special little world for girls and by girls… that Bullwinkel draws with grit and grace.” ―Booklist

“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

“[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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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 DarkRita Bullwinkel is the author of Belly Up, a story collection that won the Believer Book Award. The recipient of a 2022 Whiting Award, her work has been published in Tin House, Conjunctions, BOMB, 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.US

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