Fat City follows the lives of two men who cross paths by chance in a gym: Ernie Munger, an eighteen-year-old who hopes to become a professional boxer thanks to his natural talent, and Billy Tully, an athlete whose glory days are behind him. But, as Mauro Libertella says in his prologue, this “is not, strictly speaking, a novel about boxers. In its just under two hundred pages, it travels to the depths of that unanswered mystery that is the head and heart of men. What is a man? Gardner, almost without intending to, partly by design and partly by chance, wrote a book about a group of men who share their loneliness, and in this way he captured the intangible meaning of that question.”

When Fat City was published in 1969, it caused a stir: critics declared it “a novel destined to be a classic” and “the most moving book of the last decade.” Today it is considered a cult text, perhaps because the emotionality of these characters, sometimes defeated, sometimes barely redeemed, impacts due to its relevance.