Learn an excerpt from Stephen Fishbach’s “Survivor”-themed novel, “Escape!” (unique)

Typically, actual life is extra dramatic than fiction. However solely typically.

As a result of the issues that go down in Stephen Fishbach’s debut novel are fairly rattling dramatic. In fact, Escape! attracts closely from Fishbach’s real-life expertise as a actuality tv contestant who competed twice on Survivor in the course of the Tocantins and Cambodia seasons. So artwork is certainly imitating artwork.

Nonetheless, Fishbach — who already gained the distinguished Pushcart Prize for a brief story that may finally be folded into Escape! — has solely used his time on Survivor as a leaping off level to inform the completely engrossing story of a “pale actuality present winner” and a disgraced producer, each looking for salvation in the one place they know how you can discover such issues — again on actuality TV.

The novel, which is accessible for pre-order now and goes on sale Jan. 27, is a wild journey that may hold readers glued to the web page the identical method they’re glued to their screens throughout their favourite actuality competitors reveals. And we’ve obtained an unique excerpt you possibly can learn proper right here and proper now.

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Within the excerpt under, we see down-on-his-luck realty champion Kent making what he hopes might be his triumphant return to tv. However hopes don’t all the time flip into goals. No less than not good ones. Earlier than you benefit from the excerpt, which reveals Kent’s arrival on his TV redemption tour, try the official description for Escape!

Kent Duvall, a pale actuality present winner, simply desires one other likelihood at glory — to seek out his method out of his miserable life and again to his spotlight reel. When a scandal is captured on digicam at a charity occasion, he will get his shot, on a brand new jungle survival present with seven different contestants. Every of them has been solid as a sort — Ruddy the bully, Miriam the nerd, Ashley the love curiosity — however everyone seems to be greater than they seem.
The contestants’ objectives appear easy — survive the wild, construct a raft, win treasure. However Beck Bermann, a actuality producer who suffered her personal public shaming, sees them as characters in her redemption arc.
Because the schemes and methods spiral out, breakout camps sabotage one another and rival producers battle to regulate the storyline. Quickly the query turns into much less about who will win than who will make it out in a single piece.

Excerpt from Escape! by Stephen Fishbach

As the brilliant yellow Zodiac shivers throughout the uneven waves, Kent’s already fascinated about how he’ll describe it in his interviews. I used to be like an explorer, he’ll say. Adventuring into an uncharted world. The island beckons to him, a tropical paradise, palm timber stomach dancing on the fringe of a white sand seaside straight from a Corona advert. Two cameramen race up and down the shore, their rigs gripped in opposition to their shoulders. Two sound engineers stability their increase mikes on their heads. A drone swoops by the air. He seems like he’s rocketing right into a fable, like he’s writing himself into the pages of Treasure Island. The spray is in his face. He shakes his machete into the sky and lets out an enormous whoop, which is echoed by the scream of a red-and-green fowl that flashes upward from the jungle.

There are 9 of them clutching the Zodiac’s rubber edge, rushing towards the present. Eight contestants and Erika, a thin producer with the look of a livid terrier obvious at them from a purse. The boat’s driver, a bearded maniac who reeks of physique spray, whoops as he steers into the swells, launching them skyward and crashing again. Ashley’s subsequent to him, dolled up in a purple wrap mini that’s breathtakingly, spectacularly impractical for the outside. Throughout the boat, a younger man with skinny lips and a sweater tied round his shoulders leans again and splays his legs. He appears to be like just like the asshole boyfriend from each teen film. The older girl who was muttering to herself in casting is there. A nerd lady with Coke-bottle lenses pulls her lab coat shut. The sexpot. The villain. The battle-ax. The nerd. And right here’s Kent Duvall. The alpha male.

He by no means considered himself as an archetype earlier than his first season on Endure. He was Kent. He labored development. He went out with the fellows. Dated a bit, however by no means a girls’ man. He waited till he was eighteen to lose his virginity as a result of he wished to seek out the appropriate lady. Sort of a screwup at occasions. He’d as soon as been detained by the police when he and a few buddies drunkenly sprayed fireplace extinguishers throughout the thirty-third ground of a Vegas lodge. A median man, he figured. Then fifteen years in the past, he was strolling by the hallways of the Kimpton Resort Santa Monica, paired with two different broad-shouldered rough-handed males as they moved between conferences with casting associates and community execs. The three of them sat facet by facet exterior lodge room doorways ready to be interviewed, forbidden from talking, clearly competing for a similar spot. They weren’t the one group. Three leathery older ladies stalked by the halls. There have been three nerds, in numerous forms of nerdiness—a thin nerd with glasses, a chubby nerd with a Captain America T-shirt, and a biker with pierced eyebrows and a tattoo sleeve, who would stare upon Kent’s trio with craving each time they handed within the hallways, like by some means he obtained misfiled into the unsuitable group.

At first Kent hated how shortly he’d been decreased to a tick on a demographic survey. Like discovering out you’re a clone, you begin to marvel which elements of your self are authentically you and which elements have been mass-imprinted by the social equipment. The trio would use the lodge health club on the identical time, every man including one other couple of plates to the bench press when it was his flip. In some unspecified time in the future the third man wasn’t there. Then Kent was the one one. He was the alpha male of alpha males. This morning, when Erika gave every contestant a single survival merchandise, he obtained the machete.

He leaps off the boat earlier than it even stops shifting, holding the blade aloft like a flag. He’s sporting a lavalier mike disguised as a beaded necklace—all of them are—however the necklaces are supposedly waterproof, and the transmitters are in small waterproof pouches clipped to their underwear. Behind him the boat motors to a cease. The wind stills. The warmth presses in, warping the air. The opposite contestants climb off the Zodiac and comply with him towards shore. Kelly-Anne sashays up the seaside in full-on vamp, like she’s on a Sports activities Illustrated picture shoot. An older man, aggressively spray-tanned with a pronounced intestine and dyed black hair that’s swept backward alongside his neck, appears to be like like he could be carried away by the tide. Carl roars many times as he splashes in, like a youngsters’s toy with just one button.

They collect on the shore and provides one another excited hugs. The final one off the boat is the nerd. All of them watch as she hesitates on the gunwale. “You are able to do it, Glasses!” shouts Ashley. The lady takes a tentative step ahead, stumbles, and face-plants into the waves. The group exchanges little appears to be like. Kent can virtually hear the clown music. “I hope they allow us to vote folks off,” says the bro. Kent begins to snicker however glances shortly on the cameras. He doesn’t wish to be the bully.

When the sopping lady has joined them on the seaside, one of many producers separates from the huddle of manufacturing personnel. “Welcome to Escape!,” he says.

Excerpted from Escape! by Stephen Fishbach, printed by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random Home, LLC. Copyright (c) 2026 by Stephen Fishbach.

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