Living The Gimmick

When retired pro wrestler Alex Donovan sees his best friend, former world champion 'The Wild Child' Ray Wilder, gunned down in the street, he's drawn back into a world of spandex, spangles, and spotlights in order to find the killer. As Donovan digs deeper into Ray's life, he realizes that the list of people who wanted Ray dead seems endless. Battling his aging, failing body, Donovan feels honor-bound to avenge Ray's death when no one else seems to care. His guilt over escaping the wrestling business to build a new life when Ray couldn't - or wouldn't - drives him to find the killer, no matter if it's friend or foe. Living the Gimmick uses the backdrop of pro wrestling in the 1980s and its current climate to examine the strained bonds of a lifelong friendship and how an all-too-real abuser can exist without scrutiny in a showbiz world full of fake tough guys and choreographed fighting Early Praise for Living the Gimmick "LIVING THE GIMMICK is a bruising romp about pro wrestling, friendship, betrayal, and the lies we let ourselves believe. Bobby Mathews' career as a journalist serves him well in his debut novel; the prose is punchy, the atmosphere pungent. Mathews depicts a world of scripted violence, of showmanship and pain, where the truth is hidden behind the glam and glitter." -Chris Swann, USA Today bestseller, winner of Southern Living's Best Southern Books of 2017 Award "Mathews's impressive debut murder mystery is as much a gritty homage to the excessive, violent, glam rock world of professional wrestling as it is a testimony of how it's evolved from its oftentimes ruthless heyday to the glitzy entertainment machine it is now. LIVING THE GIMMICK is a headlock wrapped in noir sensibilities as it slams down a universal question: how much do we really know the ones we love and trust?" -Heather Levy, author WALKING THROUGH NEEDLES "​​High-class writing about hard-luck people. Timely, bold and brutal. Bobby is a writer to watch." -Libby Cudmore, author of THE BIG REWIND "At times a wild and surreal trip through the subculture of old school pro wrestling and at other times a deft love letter to the passions that drive us all, LIVING THE GIMMICK is a rollicking good time. Bobby Mathews obviously loves three things: The South, pro wrestling, and a good mystery." -S.A. Cosby, NY Times bestselling author of RAZORBLADE TEARS "Mathews writes in smooth, almost transparent strokes that propel the narrative along with such force, you'll read the entire novel in one sitting. The seedy world of wrestling and the badasses who populate it come alive on the page. Kayfabe? Hardly. This is as real and gritty as noir gets." -Hank Early, author of HEAVEN'S CROOKED LITTLE FINGER "Mathews has written a glorious, noir-steeped homage to pro wrestling, all the more remarkable in its ardent fidelity. LIVING THE GIMMICK rocks hard." -Laird Barron, author of Blood Standard

From the time he was able to body slam a pillow, Michael dreamed of becoming a professional wrestler, vanquishing imaginary enemies and nagging self-doubt with every drop kick he landed. As his buddies hit the books, Michael got hit. When they left for college, he enrolled in Shane Stratford's Wrestling Academy, where cash -- and a particularly punishing "audition" -- afforded him a first look into a world part circus, part sport, and all spectacle. From penny-ante matches to national notoriety, Michael rises through the ranks of professional wrestling. Hopped up on speed, pumped up on steroids, and fueled by a frustration he can't quite name, he adopts and discards identities in a bid to find the "gimmick" that will make him complete. His search will bring him in contact with people weird and wonderful: athletes and actors, crazy fans and crooked managers, the full rich range of folks who revel in the ring. Combining elements of sports narrative a la "North Dallas 40, " the behind-the-scenes authenticity of "Pumping Iron, " and a flair for the bizarre that recalls John Irving, "Living the Gimmick" is a novel not soon forgotten.

“The Gimmicks is a gorgeous epic that astounds with its scope and beauty. With empathy and humor, McCormick unravels the ties between brotherhood and betrayal, love and abandonment, and the fictions we create to live with the pain of the past. This novel will blow you away.” —Brit Bennett, New York Times bestselling author of The Mothers Set in the waning years of the Cold War, a stunning debut novel about a trio of young Armenians that moves from the Soviet Union, across Europe, to Southern California, and at its center, one of the most tragic cataclysms in twentieth-century history—the Armenian Genocide—whose traumatic reverberations will have unexpected consequences on all three lives. This exuberant, wholly original novel begins in Kirovakan, Armenia, in 1971. Ruben Petrosian is a serious, solitary young man who cares about two things: mastering the game of backgammon to beat his archrival, Mina, and studying the history of his ancestors. Ruben grieves the victims of the 1915 Armenian Genocide, a crime still denied by the descendants of its perpetrators, and dreams of vengeance. When his orphaned cousin, Avo, comes to live with his family, Ruben’s life is transformed. Gregarious and physically enormous, with a distinct unibrow that becomes his signature, Avo is instantly beloved. He is everything Ruben is not, yet the two form a bond they swear never to break. But their paths diverge when Ruben vanishes—drafted into an extremist group that will stop at nothing to make Turkey acknowledge the genocide. Unmoored by Ruben’s disappearance, Avo and Mina grow close in his absence. But fate brings the cousins together once more, when Ruben secretly contacts Avo, convincing him to leave Mina and join the extremists—a choice that will dramatically alter the course of their lives. Left to unravel the threads of this story is Terry “Angel Hair” Krill, a veteran of both the US Navy and the funhouse world of professional wrestling, whose life intersects with Avo, Ruben, and Mina’s in surprising and devastating ways. Told through alternating perspectives, The Gimmicks is a masterpiece of storytelling. Chris McCormick brilliantly illuminates the impact of history and injustice on ordinary lives and challenges us to confront the spectacle of violence and the specter of its aftermath.

Corpus begins with the argument that traditional disciplines are unable to fully apprehend the body and embodiment and that critical study of these topics urgently demands interdisciplinary approaches. The collection's 14 previously unpublished essays grapple with the place of bodies in a range of twenty-first century knowledge practices, including trauma, surveillance, aging, fat, food, feminist technoscience, death, disability, biopolitics, and race, among others. The book's projected audience includes teachers and scholars of bodies and embodiment, interdisciplinary scholars and practitioners, and scholars interested in the any of the substantive content covered in the book. The collection could be adopted in courses on the body at advanced undergraduate and graduate levels, including: cultural studies; queer, gender and sexuality studies; body and power; biopolitics; intersectional approaches to the body; anthropology of the body; sociology of the body; embodiment and space; digital bodies; anthropology of knowledge production; health, illness, and medicine studies; science, knowledge, and technology studies; and philosophy and social theory.

Erik Olin Wright, one of the most important sociologists of his time, takes readers along on his intimate and brave journey toward death, and asks the big questions about human mortality. From the renowned Marxist sociologist and educator Erik Olin Wright, Stardust to Stardust is a curated collection of writings from the months of his treatment and hospitalization for acute myeloid leukemia. This combination of personal narrative with Wright’s analytical perspective results in a deeply complex, philosophical meditation on death and the meaning of existence.

A lifelong sports fanatic plumbs the depths of the fan mindset, tracking the mania from the gridiron to the national political stage and beyond. The Pass. The Curse. The Double Doink. A sports fan’s life is not just defined by intense moments on a field, it’s scarred by them. For a real fan, winning isn’t everything—losing is. The true fans, it’s said, are those who have suffered the most, enduring lives defined by irrational obsession, fervid hopes, and equally gut-wrenching misery. And as Paul Campos shows, those deep feelings are windows not just onto an individual fan’s psychology but onto some of our shared concepts of community, identity, and belonging—not all of which are admirable. In A Fan’s Life, he seeks not to exalt a particular team but to explore fandom’s thorniest depths, excavating the deeper meanings of the fan’s inherently unhappy life. A Fan’s Life dives deep into the experience of being an ardent fan in a world defined more and more by the rhetoric of “winners” and “losers.” In a series of tightly argued chapters that suture together memoir and social critique, Campos chronicles his lifelong passion for University of Michigan football while meditating on fandom in the wake of the unprecedented year of 2020—when, for a time, a global pandemic took away professional and collegiate sports entirely. Fandom isn’t just leisure, he shows; it’s part of who we are, and part of even our politics, which in the age of Donald Trump have become increasingly tribal and bloody. Campos points toward where we might be heading, as our various partisan affiliations—fandoms with a grimly national significance—become all the more intense and bitterly self-defining. As he shows, we’re all fans of something, and making sense of fandom itself might offer a way to wrap our heads around our increasingly divided reality, on and off the field.

WINNER OF THE 2019 GOLDSMITHS PRIZE • SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 BOOKER PRIZE • A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2019 • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2019 • A TIME MUST-READ BOOK OF 2019 "This book has its face pressed up against the pane of the present; its form mimics the way our minds move now toggling between tabs, between the needs of small children and aging parents, between news of ecological collapse and school shootings while somehow remembering to pay taxes and fold the laundry."—Parul Sehgal, New York Times Baking a multitude of tartes tatins for local restaurants, an Ohio housewife contemplates her four kids, husband, cats and chickens. Also, America's ignoble past, and her own regrets. She is surrounded by dead lakes, fake facts, Open Carry maniacs, and oodles of online advice about survivalism, veil toss duties, and how to be more like Jane Fonda. But what do you do when you keep stepping on your son's toy tractors, your life depends on stolen land and broken treaties, and nobody helps you when you get a flat tire on the interstate, not even the Abominable Snowman? When are you allowed to start swearing? With a torrent of consciousness and an intoxicating coziness, Ducks, Newburyport lays out a whole world for you to tramp around in, by turns frightening and funny. A heart-rending indictment of America's barbarity, and a lament for the way we are blundering into environmental disaster, this book is both heresy―and a revolution in the novel.

A provocative theory of the gimmick as an aesthetic category steeped in the anxieties of capitalism. Repulsive and yet strangely attractive, the gimmick is a form that can be found virtually everywhere in capitalism. It comes in many guises: a musical hook, a financial strategy, a striptease, a novel of ideas. Above all, acclaimed theorist Sianne Ngai argues, the gimmick strikes us both as working too little (a labor-saving trick) and as working too hard (a strained effort to get our attention). Focusing on this connection to work, Ngai draws a line from gimmicks to political economy. When we call something a gimmick, we are registering uncertainties about value bound to labor and time—misgivings that indicate broader anxieties about the measurement of wealth in capitalism. With wit and critical precision, Ngai explores the extravagantly impoverished gimmick across a range of examples: the fiction of Thomas Mann, Helen DeWitt, and Henry James; photographs by Torbjørn Rødland; the video art of Stan Douglas; the theoretical writings of Stanley Cavell and Theodor Adorno. Despite its status as cheap and compromised, the gimmick emerges as a surprisingly powerful tool in this formidable contribution to aesthetic theory.