Balls: A Novel

Published by Rare Bird Books
Distributed by Simon & Schuster

LIST PRICE $22.00

PRICE MAY VARY BY RETAILER

Get 20% off with code FALL26 plus free shipping on orders of $40 or more. Discount on physical products only. Terms apply.

Buy from Other Retailers

About the Book

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.

Appearances

OCT 20
12:00AM
In Person

Julian Tepper to sign books to celebrate the launch of his new novel.

Learn More
Corner Bookstore
1313 Madison Ave
New York, NY 10128
OCT 23
7:00PM
In Person

Reading, Q&A, signing

Learn More
Book Soup
8818 Sunset Blvd
West Hollywood, CA 90069

About the Author

Julian Tepper is the author of five novels. 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.

Product Details

  • Publisher: Rare Bird Books (October 20, 2026)
  • Length: 224 pages
  • ISBN13: 9781644285978

Browse Related Books

Raves and Reviews

"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

"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

 

"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

 

Resources and Downloads

High Resolution Images

BACK TO TOP