~53,000 words
©2012
Rare Bird Books

Read reviews on Goodreads & Amazon

A New York story, a dark comedy, Balls tells of the thirty-year-old Henry Schiller, a songwriter and lounge-player, in love with a woman far younger and more musically gifted than himself, one with her eye on other men and the rise of her own career, whose crisis deepens when he discovers he has testicular cancer.

"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

"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 YorkNewsday

"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