Travel Bug Public Book Group

**HEADSHOT by Rita Bullwinkle

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. 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?

"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

“It takes focus and discipline and a certain single-mindedness to become a good prize fighter. It takes those same qualities to write a book as fresh and strong and sinuous as Headshot ... Make room, American fiction, for a meaningful new voice ... To remark that Bullwinkel is observant about Reno and its casinos would be an understatement ... There is no whimsy in Headshot. Instead, there is astringency ... The impact of this novel, though, lasts a long time, like a sharp fist to your shoulder. It is so enveloping to read that you feel, at times, that you are writing it in your own mind.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

Longlisted for the Booker Prize, Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, a 2024 Top Five Books of the Year at the Boston Herald, and a New York Times Book Club “Best New Fiction” pick — frenetic, surprising, and strikingly original, Rita Bullwinkel’s “Headshot” is a portrait of the desire, envy, perfectionism, madness, and sheer physical pleasure that motivate young women to fight—even, and perhaps especially, when no one else is watching.

Discussion group will be hosted in Travel Bug the last Tuesday of the month by Aimee Gwynne Franklyn, an independent curator, reading enthusiast, art consultant and producer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Everyone welcome!

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