Go Home, Ricky!

From rising literary star Gene Kwak comes Go Home, Ricky!, a fresh, satirical novel about masculinity and tenderness, fatherhood and motherhood, set in the world of semi-professional wrestling.

After seven years on the semi-pro wrestling circuit, Ricky Twohatchet, a.k.a. Richard Powell, needs one last match before he gets called up to the big leagues. Unlike some wrestlers who only play the stereotype, Ricky believes he comes by his persona honestly—he’s half white and half Native American—even if he’s never met his father. But the night of the match in Omaha, Nebraska, something askew in their intricate choreography sets him on a course for disaster. He finishes with a neck injury that leaves him in a restrictive brace and a video already going viral: him spewing profanities at his ex-partner, Johnny America. Injury aside, he’s out of the league.

Without a routine or identity, Ricky spirals downward, finally setting off to learn about his father, and what he finds will explode everything he knows about who he is—as a man, a friend, a son, a partner, and a wrestler. Go Home, Ricky! is a sometimes-witty, sometimes-heart-wrenching, but always gripping look into the complexities of identity.

“Go Home, Ricky! takes on the urgent themes of today—identity, belonging, economic precarity—with an almost throwback commitment to the exhilarations of voice, of language. This pile driver of a novel is original, deeply funny, and moving. Gene Kwak revels in the contradictions and nuances of life, because that’s where wisdom comes from, as well as the best fiction.” —New York Times bestselling author Sam Lipsyte