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Stephen Fishbach is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer and former television executive. A two-time Survivor USA contestant (voted onto the show the second time by more than ten million fans), he's worked on the network side as a vice president at MTV and freelanced for a reality producers' trade group. He cohosts a weekly Survivor podcast as well as the literary podcast Paraphrase. Stephen graduated with honours from Yale and received an MFA in fiction at NYU. In 2009 he was named one of People magazine's hottest bachelors. His short story ""To Sharks"" - an excerpt from Escape! - was published by One Story and garnered Stephen the Pushcart Prize. He lives in Washington, DC, with his wife and two daughters.
‘Stephen Fishbach writes with great energy and humor, as well as a deep understanding of human longing.’ * Jonathan Safran Foer * ‘A thrilling, emotionally affecting deep dive into the perilous world of reality television production, in all its manipulative glory. In this sharp page-turner, Survivor maven and former contestant Stephen Fishbach captures the lives of both cast and crew, offering up a gorgeously written, compassionate, but ultimately devastating portrait of the lives of the human beings working inside (and often, crushed by) the entertainment machine.’ * Emily Nussbaum, author of Cue The Sun: The Invention of Reality TV and Staff Writer at The New Yorker * ‘Stephen Fishbach channels his experience as a reality television star into this hilarious, biting, insightful, and ultimately heartfelt novel about our fame-obsessed culture and a show that pushes its cast to their emotional and physical limits. He can turn a sentence as well as he can boil a plot, and you'll be marveling at the story even as you're hooting and cringing at the wild, reckless, and seemingly inescapable decisions the characters make.’ * Benjamin Percy, author of The Ninth Metal, Red Moon, The Dead Lands, and Thrill Me * ‘Captivating, insightful, and incredibly propulsive, this novel delivers the escape a lot of us need right now. With an expert eye, Fishbach will take you both behind the scenes and amidst the drama of a reality contest show gone amok, with characters you'll root for and a plot that makes the pages fly.’ * J. Ryan Stradal, bestselling author of Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club * ‘Fishbach has pulled back the curtain on reality television and his resulting novel is razor-sharp and darkly unsettling. Escape! manages to be both a wicked romp of a page-turner and a poignant insider critique of fame, ambition, and the human craving for connection. You definitely won’t want to change the channel on this one.’ * Janelle Brown, New York Times bestselling author of What Kind of Paradise and Pretty Things *
