First Novel Friday: Hot Girls with Balls, Gingko Season, and Lonely Crowds

Friday, 6:00 pm EDT - 8:15 pm EDT August 1, 2025

The Center for Fiction
& Livestreamed

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In-person tickets to this event are sold out. Register for the livestream above.

On the first Friday of the month, join us as we celebrate and launch a selection of the best debut novels published today. Be among the first to discover boundary-pushing and world-expanding work from exciting new voices in fiction.

Kick off the weekend with a happy hour at our cash bar for ticket holders in our Members Lounge starting at 6pm. Then, at 7pm, we’ll move to our auditorium for readings from the featured debut novelists, followed by a short moderated conversation. The party continues with book signings and signature cocktails to round out the night. Go home with something new—a book, a friend, a favorite Friday night tradition.

This month’s novels feature characters searching for a sense of self and place in the world while being pulled in many directions. Torrey Peters, author of the PEN/Hemingway Award-winning novel Detransition, Baby, will moderate. We hope you will support our featured debut novelists by purchasing their books at the event (purchase all three for 15% off). Space is limited, so reserve your spot today!

We offer two in-person ticket options: the $5 Community Ticket and the $15+ Supporter Ticket. Both provide the same access, but if you’re able, we kindly suggest registering for the Supporter Ticket to help sustain our programs for emerging writers.

August’s Featured Debuts:

Gingko Season by Naomi Xu Elegant
After suffering her first big heartbreak two years earlier, Penelope Lin has built a quiet life with no romantic entanglements. She spends her days cataloging a museum’s vast collection of Qing Dynasty bound-foot shoes and in the comfortable company of close friends. One day, she happens to meet Hoang, who confesses to releasing mice from the cancer research lab where he works. Hoang’s openness catches Penelope off guard; from then on, she finds her carefully constructed life slowly starting to unravel. Told in Penelope’s witty, vulnerable, and thoroughly endearing voice, Ginkgo Season captures three seasons of reawakening, challenges, and transformation.

Hot Girls with Balls by Benedict Nguyễn
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. Together, they’re going where no Asian American trans woman has gone before: the men’s pro indoor volleyball league. 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. Can Green stock up enough clout for her post-ball future? Can Six girlboss her team’s seniority politics? Can they both take a time-out to just grieve? Their rabid fans and horny haters await their next move.

Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu
While Maria, charismatic and aware of her ability to influence others, eases into her full self, embracing her sexuality and her desire to be an artist, Ruth is mostly content to follow her around. There, ambition and competition threaten to rupture their friendship, while strong and unspoken forces pull them together over the years. Whereas Maria finds early success in New York City as an artist, Ruth stumbles along the fringes of the art world, pulled toward a quieter life of work and marriage. As their lives converge and diverge, they meet in one final and fateful confrontation. Ruth and Maria’s decades-long friendship interrogates the nature of intimacy, desire, class, and time. What does it mean to be an artist and to be true to oneself? What does it mean to give up on an obsession?

Featuring

Naomi Xu Elegant

Naomi Xu Elegant

Naomi Xu Elegant is a writer and journalist living in New York City. Her work has appeared in Monocle, Fortune, Atlas Obscura, and elsewhere.
Benedict Nguyễn

Benedict Nguyễn

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.

Photo Credit: Cirsty Burton
Stephanie Wambugu

Stephanie Wambugu

Stephanie Wambugu was born in Mombasa, Kenya in 1998 and grew up in Rhode Island. She lives and works in New York, where she received her MFA from Columbia University. She is an editor of Joyland magazine. Lonely Crowds is her first novel.

Photo Credit: Elijah Townsend
Torrey Peters

Torrey Peters

Torrey Peters is the author of the novel Detransition, Baby, which won the 2021 PEN/Hemingway award for debut fiction and was named a Best Book of the Century by the New York Times. Her second book, Stag Dance—a quartet of novellas—was published last March. Torrey is an amateur sauna builder and rides a pink motorcycle.

Featured Books

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Gingko Season

By Naomi Xu Elegant

Published by W. W. Norton & Company

PURCHASE

After suffering her first big heartbreak two years earlier, Penelope Lin has built a quiet life with no romantic entanglements. She spends her days cataloging a museum’s vast collection of Qing Dynasty bound-foot shoes and in the comfortable company of close friends. One day, she happens to meet Hoang, who confesses to releasing mice from the cancer research lab where he works. Hoang’s openness catches Penelope off guard; from then on, she finds her carefully constructed life slowly start to unravel. Told in Penelope’s witty, vulnerable, and thoroughly endearing voice, Ginkgo Season captures three seasons of reawakening, challenges, and transformation.

This wise and tenderhearted novel explores the nature of our deepest friendships as seriously as it does the dizzying terror and thrill of falling in love, and the complications of trying to live a life that matches your ideals.
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Hot Girls with Balls

By Benedict Nguyễn

Published by Catapult

PURCHASE

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. Together, they’re going where no Asian American trans woman has gone before: the men’s pro indoor volleyball league. Our hot girls with balls just thought playing with the boys would spare them some controversy . . . haha.

In between their rival teams’ away games across the globe, Six and Green stay connected on SpaceTime and selflessly broadcast their romance to 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 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 time-out to just grieve? Their rabid fans and horny haters await their next move. We’re all just desperate for a whiff of the sweaty feminine energy that makes that ball thwack with such spectacular force.

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Lonely Crowds

By Stephanie Wambugu

Published by Little, Brown and Company

PURCHASE

Ruth, an only child of recent immigrants to New England, lives in an emotionally cold home and attends the local Catholic girl’s school on a scholarship. Maria, a beautiful orphan whose Panamanian mother dies by suicide and is taken care of by an ill, unloving aunt, is one of the only other students attending the school on a scholarship. Ruth is drawn forcefully into Maria’s orbit, and they fall into an easy, yet intense, friendship. Her devotion to her charming and bright new friend opens up her previously sheltered world.

While Maria, charismatic and aware of her ability to influence others, eases into her full self, embracing her sexuality and her desire to be an artist, Ruth is mostly content to follow her around: to college and then into the early-nineties art world of New York City. There, ambition and competition threaten to rupture their friendship, while strong and unspoken forces pull them together over the years. Whereas Maria finds early success in New York City as an artist, Ruth stumbles along the fringes of the art world, pulled toward a quieter life of work and marriage. As their lives converge and diverge, they meet in one final and fateful confrontation.

Ruth and Maria’s decades-long friendship interrogates the nature of intimacy, desire, class and time. What does it mean to be an artist and to be true to oneself? What does it mean to give up on an obsession? Marking the arrival of a sensational new literary talent, Lonely Crowds challenges us to reckon honestly with our own ambitions and the lives we hope to lead.