Every now and then, a book comes along that changes our understanding of what we once considered known and true. The Redshirt does that for football, the literary sports novel, and modern American masculinity, all at once. Corey Sobel, a former football player, has written a violent and tender elegy to the sport and life that shaped him. He's a keen, creative force, and The Redshirt promises to be one of 2020's finest debuts.
~Matt Gallagher, author of Empire City and Youngblood
The Redshirt is a timely and anthropologically rich examination of masculinity, sexuality, and football. First and foremost, though, it's a skillfully narrated and completely engrossing novel. This is a terrific debut from Corey Sobel.
~Chris Bachelder, author of National Book Award Finalist, The Throwback Special and Abbot Awaits
I have never read anything that provides such sensitive and attentive insights into the peculiar yet burdensome pressures on young men to fulfill societal, familial, communal, and cultural expectations of masculinity. The scenes of games and plays are intense.
~Lisa Williams, series editor for the New Poetry and Prose Series, Creative Writing Program Director at Centre College, and author of three books of poems, most recently Gazelle in the House
Corey Sobel goes so deep into his characters, particularly Miles, that you can not only under- stand their observations and anxieties, but you can FEEL them. You can become them. Not many books can pull that off, but The Redshirt does it, yard by yard.
~Drew Magary, author of Point B and The Hike
A brave and gorgeous debut, The Redshirt is a gut-wrenching literary exploration of the violence and social pressures enforcing masculine identity. Sobel has created a poetic page- turner, a complex yet incisive story about the pain of repressed desire—that of the body and of the mind—and the ways literature can offer a means of resistance and a new identity.
~Deni Ellis Béchard, Commonwealth Writers' Prize–winning author of A Song from Faraway
It's all too easy to watch a college football game without considering the humans underneath the helmets. Corey Sobel pierces that blissful ignorance, turning gridiron stars into three- dimensional characters whose obsessions and anxieties become the reader's own.
~Megan Greenwell, editor of WIRED.com, senior editor at ESPN The Magazine, and former editor in chief of Deadspin
I absolutely love The Redshirt. This is a surefooted, wise, sardonic, and brutally honest novel about race, football, and the American university—it reminds me of Ben Fountain, Colson Whitehead—yes, even DFW would look down with approval.
~Jess Row, author of Your Face in Mine and White Flights
Corey Sobel's magnificent debut novel exposes the hypermasculinity of collegiate football as a freshman starts at a Division One school.. Literary and beautiful lines transport readers to the boys' Southern college, where the football team is no good and no one cares. The Redshirt is a gorgeous novel in which two young men learn who they truly are, with and without the drama of college football.
~Ashley Holstrom, Foreword Reviews
Sobel debuts with an incisive, sweeping portrait of a secretly gay college football player. The author captures Reshawn's frustration and Miles's conflicted desires in sharp prose. Sobel's fervent, literary treatment of sexuality and masculinity perfectly captures the messy world of college sports.
~Publishers Weekly
Corey Sobel's The Redshirt is an impressive and beguiling first novel. A rare and honest look at life and sports at an elite college, the book is also a powerful, nuanced, and surprising examination of how tangled personal relationships become when they clash with institutional imperatives.
~Peter Orner, author of Maggie Brown & Others and National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist Am I Alone Here?
The Redshirt is not just a novel of great beauty. It is also a reckoning and an incantation. It's not possible to close such a novel and leave unchanged.
~Rion Amilcar Scott, author of The World Doesn't Require You and the PEN/Bingham Prize-winning Insurrections
Sobel, who attended Duke on a football scholarship, writes engrossingly about football's punishing physical and psychological rituals. The core crises that Miles and Reshawn face feel authentic, and Sobel smoothly persuades the reader to witness their many bruises. A promising debut.
~Kirkus Reviews
The Redshirt is an absorbing portrait of the culture of college athletics as expressed at an institution determined to move from loser to winner at football.
~The New York Journal of Books
Like the best sports-focused books that expand to and endure in broader cultural circles, The Redshirt is about so much more than the game it's built around, college football. It's about identity and race and class and sex and systems and how our old ideals of masculinity have fared in the new century. It's both a brutal reckoning and a tender elegy.
~Esquire
Beyond illuminating the allure of college football, The Redshirt is a powerful exploration of the emotional relationships between men, and the ways that race, class and sexuality shape those dynamics.
~The Aurora Sentinel
A very strong debut novel that draws jagged, vivid links between sport and society.
~Star Tribune
The Redshirt is an understated yet seething novel about what it means to be a man and is one of the best football novels to come along in recent years.
~Michael Schaub, NPR
The Redshirt may be the only novel about football I'll ever read, but what a novel about football it is. I highly recommend this heartfelt, unusual, book to every American who has ever watched a football game, attended a college sports event, studied for a test, loved another person... In other words, Sobel's debut works for us all.
~Bethanne Patrick, Literary Hub
