Balls: A Novel - by Julian Tepper (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Set in New York's late-night bars and back rooms, Balls is a darkly comic portrait of ambition, desire, and masculine fragility.

Henry Schiller is thirty, a drifting songwriter and lounge pianist, in love with a woman younger, sharper, and more talented than he is--one already looking past him toward other men and a bigger future. When Henry is diagnosed with testicular cancer, his romantic anxieties collide with a far more existential reckoning, forcing him to confront the limits of love, art, and his own vanishing sense of control.

Review Quotes

"Balls is a lost and found of youth, love, creativity, and New York life. With humor and angst, keeping things secretly within and letting a few out, Henry Schiller is its embodiment, and it is his body parts and nervous system that give the book its title and its consciousness. Julian Tepper, writing his first novel, will remind you of others who began their great careers with such a character and dilemma, but he will also strike you as surely original in just how he makes it all so, well, ballsy."

--Steven Isenberg, former publisher of New York Newsday

"Julian Tepper has summoned a voice that is strangely familiar and also exotic: a voice from the old country, redolent of Bruce J. Friedman. It's like Mad Men with Jews. And balls. Delightful."

--Thomas Beller, Founder of Open City and author of How to Be a Man

"My only regret is that I didn't write this novel myself. Balls is hilarious and beautifully written. Really, a beautiful read . . . with a real New York sensibility."--Tony Roberts, star of Woody Allen's Annie Hall and Sidney Lumet's Serpico

About the Author

Julian Tepper's fifth novel, Getting Even/Letting Go (Rare Bird), will be published in the fall of 2026. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Playboy, Brooklyn Rail, Zyzzyva, Daily Beast, Bomb, Tablet Magazine, The New York Review of Architecture, and elsewhere. His essay, "Locking Down with the Family You've Just Eviscerated in a Novel" was a "Notable Essay of 2022" in Best American Essays 2022. He was born and raised in New York City.