Thrown

In this darkly funny work of literary reportage, narrated by an excitable, semi-fictionalized graduate student named Kit, a bookish young woman insinuates herself into the lives of two cage fighters - one a young prodigy, the other an ageing journeyman. Kerry Howley follows these men for three years through the bloody world of mixed martial arts as they starve themselves, break bones, fail their families and form new ones in the quest to rise from remote Midwestern fairgrounds to packed Vegas arenas. With penetrating intelligence and wry humor, Howley exposes the profundities and absurdities of this American subculture.