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About the author:
Chris Koslowski's novel, Kayfabe, is forthcoming from McSweeney’s. His short fiction has appeared in Blue Mesa Review, Front Porch Journal, and Day One. Chris has a BA in English from the University of Michigan, an MA in English from the University of Cincinnati, and an MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of South Carolina, where he served as editor of the literary journal Yemassee.
About the book:
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.
About the conversation partner:
Anjali Sachdeva’s short story collection, All the Names They Used for God, was the winner of the he 2019 Chautauqua Prize and the 2022 Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France), and was named a Best Book of 2018 by NPR. It was named a Best Book of 2018 by NPR, Refinery 29, and BookRiot, longlisted for the Story Prize, and chosen as the 2018 Fiction Book of the Year by the Reading Women podcast. The New York Times Book Review called the collection "strange and wonderful," and Roxane Gay called it, "One of the best collections I’ve ever read. Every single story is a stand out." Her stories have been published in McSweeney’s Quarterly, Lightspeed, http://Tor.com , and Vogue India, and featured on the LeVar Burton Reads podcast. She is the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and an Investing in Professional Artists grant from the Heinz Endowments and the Pittsburgh Foundation. She currently teaches in the MFA program at Chatham University, and in the low-residency MFA program at Randolph College.
She has hiked through the backcountry of Canada, Iceland, Kenya, Mexico, and the United States, and spent much of her childhood reading fantasy novels and waiting to be whisked away to an alternate universe. Instead, she lives in Pittsburgh, which is pretty wonderful as far as places in this universe go.