The Way Of The Fight

An intimate, human and philosophical look at the life of the UFC world champion—his journey from years of bullying to the very top of the world of mixed martial arts As the world’s most popular UFC fighter, Georges “Rush” St-Pierre seems almost impossibly tough and dominant. But long before he was “GSP,” as his millions of fans know him, he was just a kid harassed by bullies. But he was also a kid who, thanks to years of practicing martial arts, invented his own way of life. He became a black belt in karate at the age of 12. In his later teens, working as a garbage collector to finance his unique and innovative training methods, GSP learned from repeated losses and ultimately found a way to triumph in a highly competitive field. Along the way, he discovered a simple truth: never stop reaching for your goal. With startling honesty, GSP relates the true story of growing up in the martial arts and discovering that his passion for learning and constant improvement makes him happy. By way of fighting, he’s discovered how to succeed; by way of injury, how to maintain perspective on that success. This book highlights the lessons that brought him there, the unique system he invented to combine various forms of fighting arts, and the key people who helped make him world champion.

Claiming that “the belt is just an accessory,” Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) Lightweight Champion B.J. Penn explains Why I Fight in this honest, intimate, and fascinating memoir. Written with David Weintraub, Why I Fight is an unforgettable portrait of one of the top and most recognizable mixed martial artists in the UFC and an up-close look at one of the most exciting and fastest growing sports in the world. UFC and Jiu-Jitsu aficionados—and fans of Iceman, A Fighter’s Heart, and Bruce Lee’s classic The Tao of Jeet Kun Do—will want to explore Why I Fight.

A New York Times Bestseller, Got Fight? is an hysterical, entertaining, and in-your-face guide to fighting from the most enigmatic and unpredictable fighter in Mixed Martial Arts (MMA). Forrest Griffin is the light-heavyweight champion of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and was the winner of the first season of Spike TV’s The Ultimate Fighter; in Got Fight?, he shows you how he did it. With Erich Krauss, Muay Thai fighter and co-author of “The Prodigy” B.J. Penn’s Mixed Martial Arts: The Book of Knowledge.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2021 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE FINALIST FOR THE 2021 ATWOOD GIBSON WRITERS’ TRUST FICTION PRIZE Named a Best Book of the Year by The Globe and Mail ● CBC ● USA Today ● NPR A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice An Amazon Editors’ Pick An Indie Next Pick An Apple Book of the Month One of Indigo’s “Top 10 Best Canadian Fiction Books of 2021” The beloved author of bestsellers Women Talking, All My Puny Sorrows, and A Complicated Kindness returns with a funny, smart, headlong rush of a novel full of wit, flawless writing, and a tribute to perseverance and love in an unusual family. Fight Night is told in the unforgettable voice of Swiv, a nine-year-old living in Toronto with her pregnant mother, who is raising Swiv while caring for her own elderly, frail, yet extraordinarily lively mother. When Swiv is expelled from school, Grandma takes on the role of teacher and gives her the task of writing to Swiv's absent father about life in the household during the last trimester of the pregnancy. In turn, Swiv gives Grandma an assignment: to write a letter to "Gord," her unborn grandchild (and Swiv's soon-to-be brother or sister). "You’re a small thing," Grandma writes to Gord, "and you must learn to fight." As Swiv records her thoughts and observations, Fight Night unspools the pain, love, laughter, and above all, will to live a good life across three generations of women in a close-knit family. But it is Swiv’s exasperating, wise and irrepressible Grandma who is at the heart of this novel: someone who knows intimately what it costs to survive in this world, yet has found a way—painfully, joyously, ferociously—to love and fight to the end, on her own terms.

101 Ways to Win a Fight (Basic to Bone Breaking) is not about flashy moves, the secrets to winning a mixed martial arts competition, or even how to improve one's life through the mental and physical disciplines of martial art education. This book presents realistic self-preservation techniques designed to give the average person (male or female) the upper hand in any brutal attack situation. The awareness and avoidance strategies, dirty tricks, self-defense gadgets, handheld weapons, and fighting moves cataloged may be the tipping point, giving you enough time to make it home safe.

Shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing A physical and philosophical mediation on why we are drawn to fight each other for sport, what happens to our bodies and brains when we do, and what it all means Anyone with guts or madness in him can get hit by someone who knows how; it takes a different kind of madness, a more persistent kind, to stick around long enough to be one of the people who does the knowing. Josh Rosenblatt was thirty-three years old when he first realized he wanted to fight. A lifelong pacifist with a philosopher’s hatred of violence and a dandy’s aversion to exercise, he drank to excess, smoked passionately, ate indifferently, and mocked physical activity that didn’t involve nudity. But deep down inside there was always some part of him that was attracted to the idea of fighting. So, after studying Muay Thai, Krav Maga, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and boxing, he decided, at age forty, that it was finally time to fight his first—and only—mixed martial arts match: all in the name of experience and transcending ancient fears. An insightful and moving rumination on the nature of fighting, Why We Fight takes us on his journey from the bleachers to the ring. Using his own training as an opportunity to understand how the sport illuminates basic human impulses, Rosenblatt weaves together cultural history, criticism, biology, and anthropology to understand what happens to the human body and mind when under attack, and to explore why he, a self-described “cowardly boy from the suburbs,” discovered so much meaning in putting his body, and others’, at risk. From the psychology of fear to the physiology of pain, from Ukrainian shtetls to Brooklyn boxing gyms, from Lord Byron to George Plimpton, Why We Fight is a fierce inquiry into the abiding appeal of our most conflicted and controversial fixation, interwoven with a firsthand account of what happens when a mild-mannered intellectual decides to step into the ring for his first real showdown.

Late Medieval and Early Modern Fight Books offers insights into the cultural and historical transmission and practices of martial arts, based on interdisciplinary research on the corpus of the Fight Books (Fechtbücher) in 14th- to 17th-century Europe.

"Why are we willing to die for our countries? How can ideology persuade someone to blow themselves up? When we go to war, morality, religion and ideology often take the blame. But Mike Martin boldly argues that the opposite is true: rather than driving violence, these things help to reduce it. While we resort to ideas and values to justify or interpret warfare, something else is really propelling us towards conflict: our subconscious desires, shaped by millions of years of evolution.