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BENEDICT NGUYỄN is a dancer and gym buff. 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, The Margins, and other publications. In 2022, she published nasty notes, a redacted email zine on freelance labor. Hot Girls with Balls is her first novel.
Literary Hub, A Most Anticipated Book of the Year Electric Literature, A Most Anticipated Book of the Year Debutiful, A Most Anticipated Book of 2025 ""The tone is light comedy, but the substance is real enough . . . Class difference is one of the least explored dimensions of trans life. Fortunately, Nguyen doesn’t offer an imaginary resolution to the real contradictions of class. It’s enough to illuminate them."" —McKenzie Wark, e-flux ""Terrific and sidesplitting . . . It’s the type of novel that is effortlessly laugh-out-loud funny."" —Debutiful ""A joyfully hailed satire."" —R.O. Kwon, Electric Literature ""Hot Girls with Balls is an antic drama of fame, envy, and vanity, equal parts kinetic and erotic, and intensely self-aware—like if Challengers included the online discourse about Challengers. More than anything else, it's about the perilous double-bind of visibility: how you need it to have your existence acknowledged, and how it constrains and deforms that same existence. All the ills of the internet are here: the performed vulnerability, the eternal servitude to the peanut gallery, that paranoid feeling of all humanity constantly looking over your shoulder—including a couple of real freaks. Like any good volleyball player, Benedict Nguyễn can truly serve, and knows just when to go in for the kill."" —Tony Tulathimutte, author of Rejection ""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 ""Nguyễn serves up sharp, hilarious satire about trans celebrity and the limits and costs of trying to change a world from within it. I’ve never read such an unflinching celebration of the weird, violent poetry of online trans discourse, and was here for Six and Green’s journey—via fierce tournament play, lesbian processing, brand deals and soaring follower counts—somehow to rise above it."" —Jeanne Thornton, author of Summer Fun and A/S/L
