Balls: A Novel [paperback] by Julian Tepper

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.

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.