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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, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Vanity Fair, the Brooklyn Rail, the Margins, and other publications. In 2022, she published nasty notes, a redacted e-mail zine on freelance labor. Hot Girls with Balls (Catapult, July 1, 2025) is her debut novel, an outrageous and deeply serious satire about two star indoor volleyball players who juggle unspoken jealousies in their off-court romance ahead of their rival teams' first rematch in a year.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
Friends to lovers/secret enemies; volleyball; jealousy; dyke dolls in the straight boys club; horny, hateful, hilarious discourse; literary grumpy sunshine; Six and Green summer.
On your nightstand now:
Tiny books! Tiny, tiny books! Some of these recents could be called novellas, but what are labels anyway? There's Vera Blossom's resounding and humorous essay collection How to Fuck Like a Girl and Katie Yee's wryly contemplative debut novel, Maggie; or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar. I don't know how Omar El Akkad wrote the sharply constructed essay collection One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This in such a short timeline but we applaud it for every reason. In poetry, there's Tramaine Suubi's stellar debut collection, Phases, structured around the moon, and Zefyr Lisowski's dazzling and dizzying (both compliments) Girl Work.
Katie Kitamura's Audition and Michael Amherst's The Boyhood of Cain paint such vivid character studies and they're tiny books! Must mention Andrea Abreu's Dogs of Summer and Natasha Brown's Assembly and Henry Hoke's Open Throat and the new re-issue of Elaine Kraf's 1979 The Princess of 72nd Street. Just finished Sebastian Castillo's Fresh, Green Life, which meditates on yearning for an old crush (totally unrelatable, btw) and that uneasy commitment to a life of ideas with humor, depth, and fewer than 150 pages. Tiny books, big punches!
Favorite book when you were a child:
Juniper by Monica Furlong follows a young teenage witch assuming her powers, which, of course, go beyond magic!
Your top five authors:
I could never! But this year in "would drop everything to read the next" presents at least two contenders. First, Anelise Chen's memoir Clam Down. Her debut novel, So Many Olympic Exertions, was infectiously curious about not just human physicality but will and spirit too. I promise I read about other kinds of character journeys; I'm just on a theme right now! Also, Susan Choi's Flashlight! Has anyone captured the embarrassment of young adulthood better than Choi in My Education?
Book you've faked reading:
I would never! If such a book exists, my having faked it has also been wiped from the hard drive. Truly can't wait to read XYZ! ;)
Book you're an evangelist for:
For the past couple years, Post-Traumatic by Chantal V. Johnson has been a consistent rec. Refracting the way the novel as a whole treats its titular subject matter with its protagonist's view of herself and her life is must-discuss literature.
Book you've bought for the cover:
The new collection by Clarice Lispector, Covert Joy, is glossy all over and incidentally, the work's translator, Katrina Dodson, is also very glamorous!
Book that changed your life:
Monique Truong's The Book of Salt and all of its beautifully fraught character dynamics.
Favorite line from a book:
Recently, from Harron Walker's essay collection Aggregated Discontent: "You can't shatter a glass ceiling if you're afraid of a little blood." Smash! Via a speculative reread that aligns Anne Hathaway's characters in The Devil Wears Prada and The Intern in the same narrative arc, Walker pillories white girlboss feminism with delicious disdain. This tour de force of an essay is discomfitingly uncanny and, of course, hilarious.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
If one could retcon books into the past, teenage me would've appreciated all the wisdom in Jeanne Thornton's A/S/L on womanhood and friendship and the Internet back then! Adult me loves it too, of course!