The Fighter - Hardcover

Michael Farris Smith is the author of Desperation Road, Rivers and The Hands of Strangers and is the recipient of the 2014 Mississippi Author Award. His short fiction has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and his essays have appeared in the New York Times, Catfish Alley, Deep South Magazine, and more. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with his wife and two daughters.

Praise for The Fighter

"One of those wonderful and rare books that's both a page-turner and a novel of great depth and emotion. The Fighter is Southern noir at its finest."―Ace Atkins, New York Times bestselling author of The Fallen and The Sinners

"It is a devastatingly efficient novel that coils and releases its mammoth punches in blinding succession - the literary equivalent of a first-round knockout. It's over before you're ready to let it go, but it remains viscerally satisfying in its brutality and brevity."―Winnipeg Free Press

"Michael Farris Smith is so good, I might actually hate him a little bit. The Fighter is a book I wish I'd written but am deeply grateful I got to read. It is a masterful portrait of place and character and how one influences the other, with language that is both brutal and tender at once. Smith loves Jack Boucher and the Mississippi Delta to the bone."―Attica Locke, author of Bluebird, Bluebird

"I loved The Fighter. Michael Farris Smith is one of the most exciting new voices in American fiction. Just as I couldn't put down Desperation Road till I finished, I tore through this novel as well. I'm hooked."
―Brad Watson, author of Miss Jane

"The Fighter is a beautifully written parable of a man, abandoned as a child, at war with himself. Hiding behind the expertly-handled plot and poetic meditations on violence and substance abuse is the notion that lack of family can send you on a continuous tumble through darkness. With its tension-filled and enlightening final chapters, The Fighter delivers a powerful and engaging read from one of our newest and finest writers."
―Tim Gautreaux, author of The Missing


"Michael Farris Smith is continuing the Southern Gothic tradition of William Gay and Flannery O'Connor. Drenched in sorrow and written with complex language, The Fighter moves toward a conclusion both surprising and inevitable."―Chris Offutt, author of Country Dark and Kentucky Straight

"Like living language, literary modes have both a formal and a demotic form. What we call 'noir' is high tragedy brought down to the forgotten and disavowed--the fallen, who can do little but go on falling. Ours to witness the beauty and power of their fall. With The Fighter, Michael Farris Smith brings that tradition brilliantly into the present."―James Sallis, author of Drive

"This resourceful writer weds violence, despair, and glimmers of hope during a few tense days in the life of a once-legendary bare-knuckle fighter... A gifted storyteller who parses battered dreams and the legacies of abandonment with a harsh realism that is both saddening and engaging."―Kirkus (starred review)

"This crisply written tale of thwarted lives and rawboned courage will sit comfortably alongside the similarly hardscrabble work of Daniel Woodrell and Chris Offutt."―Booklist (starred review)

"Ferocious... vivid descriptions never slow the pace of the plot, which moves swiftly toward an inevitable but still surprising climax. As violent as it is poetic, Smith's novel draws the reader in from beginning to end."―Publishers Weekly