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A Novel
by Benedict Nguyen
In this outrageous and deeply serious satire, two star indoor volleyball players juggle unspoken jealousies in their off-court romance ahead of their rival teams' first rematch in a year.
Six is 6'7", scheming to rejoin the starting lineup, and barely checks her phone. Green is 6'1", always building her brand, and secretly jealous of her more famous girlfriend. They're gutsy, gorgeous babes going where no Asian American trans woman has gone before: the men's pro indoor volleyball league. Six and Green are… hot girls with balls.
In between their rival teams' away games across the globe, they stay connected on SpaceTime and selflessly broadcast their romance with fans on their weekly Instagraph live show. After a long season, they'll finally reunite for the championship tournament, the first to accommodate in-person fans since the COVIS pandemic struck the world a year ago. Just as they enter an airtight bro bubble of the world's best, they're faced with a public crisis that demands an indisputably humiliating task: make a public statement online.
Can Green stock up enough clout for her post-ball future? Can Six girlboss her team's seniority politics? Can they both take a timeout to just grieve? Their rabid fans and horny haters await their next move. We're all just desperate for a whiff of the feminine sweaty energy that makes that ball thwack with such spectacular force.
"Hot Girls with Balls is a thrillingly cheeky, tenderly irreverent, seriously funny novel, anchored by a loving duo I couldn't stop rooting for and featuring a very spicy send-up of the comments section. No one is spared from Benedict Nguyễn's dishy satire, but with writing this alive, we wouldn't want it any other way." —Chantal V. Johnson, author of Post-Traumatic
"I rarely come across a novel with the style, humor, and vitality of Hot Girls with Balls. It's a rigorous and gutting satire, a courageous social fantasy, a realistic portrait of the hell that is humanity, a deeply felt book about love and competition. Benedict Nguyễn is a star. I love the way she sees the world." —Patrick Cottrell, author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace
"Hot Girls with Balls is a cheeky and daring presentation of women defining themselves for the love of the game. Nguyễn moves blithely through Six and Green's ability to balance their own bodily autonomy, the transphobic/fetish gaze, and the love and envy that can exist for these women creating themselves in the gender segregationist world of sports. Dear reader, consider yourself immersed in the world that is Hot Girls with Balls!" —Jasmine Gibson, author of A Beauty Has Come
This information about Hot Girls with Balls was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Benedict Nguyen is a dancer and gym regular. Between pistol squats and muscle ups, she works as a creative producer in live performance. She's written for The Baffler, BOMB, Los Angeles Review of Books, Vanity Fair, The Brooklyn Rail, AAWW's The Margins, and more. In 2022, she published the redacted email zine on freelance labor, nasty notes. Hot Girls with Balls is her first novel.
My Darling Boy by John Dufresne
The story of of a man whose son collapses into addiction and vanishes into the chaotic netherworld of southern Florida.
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