Horsemen of the Esophagus

Competitive eating and the big fat American dream

Buy HORSEMEN in paperback ⟶

I spent a year of my life with competitive eaters, watching them perform and trying to figure out what it all meant. I was 25 years old when I did this. I still wake up in the morning sometimes and remember that I wrote this book, and it seems very improbable, like some bizarre dream. The book is good though. I loved writing it.

The image at left is the Crown paperback. In the UK, Yellow Jersey released the book under a different title (they called it INSATIABLE) and Random House Kodansha translated the book into Japanese.

From the May 2006 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, here’s a 6,000-word excerpt from HORSEMEN.