"Penn Jillette’s tremendous new novel is about juggling. Not just literal juggling—though it is the great American juggling novel—but on every metaphoric level too: moral, sexual, biographical, linguistic. Felony Juggler is deep and hilarious, raunchy, breakneck, entertaining, and thoughtful—everything you’d expect from Penn Jillette."— Elizabeth McCracken, author of The Hero of This Book
"If you think street performing isn't fun and bank robbery is fun or that you know how the Rolling Stones make money, you've got a lot to learn. And it's all in Penn Jillette's can't-put-it-down page-turner Felony Juggler, where you'll discover that 'everything is juggling.'"— Lawrence O’Donnell, television host
"Penn writes a crime thriller the way he writes a magic trick: he tells you the secret while he fools the hell out of you. Felony Juggler is crazy brilliant!"— Teller
"This is a brilliant novel, spiked with autobiographical elements . . . Jillette is a nimble writer, taking delight in playing with the language and speaking directly to the reader when it suits him, pulling us into Poe’s story and refusing to let us go. Readers familiar with Jillette only through his numerous appearances on television and in film, as well as those seeking unusual variations on the caper trope, will be surprised and captivated."— Booklist
"Jillette follows up Random with this skillful story of a gifted entertainer who gets caught up in violent crime . . . It’s a hoot."— Publishers Weekly
"A very funny, oft-vulgar cautionary tale that doesn’t pull any punches . . . A fast-talking, ball-juggling tall tale about long shots, escape attempts, and other bad decisions."— Kirkus Reviews
"Jillette’s latest novel, Random, is about a young man who inherits his father’s crushing debt to a loan shark and turns to dice—and other dangerous measures—to dig himself out. That the dice bring him luck sends him a new philosophy of leaving decisions both big and small up to chance."— New York Times, on Random
"Penn Jillette is an atheist, triple-goddamned lunatic, and his book is a glorious Las Vegas lunatic paean to chance and adventure—a page-turning, scabrous, hilarious ride into randomness."— Neil Gaiman, on Random
"Jillette (Presto!), the magician best known as the verbal half of Penn and Teller, unveils an entertaining Las Vegas picaresque . . . Jillette’s acerbic wit and perfect pacing keep this afloat. Readers will hope Jillette has more fiction up his sleeves."— Publishers Weekly, on Random
"Penn Jillette is half of Penn & Teller, the longest-running magic show in Las Vegas. This is his crime-fiction debut, and he has put together a wild story set in Sin City that is sinfully diverting . . . [A] crackerjack caper."— Booklist, on Random
"Jillette is one of our weirder national treasures. [His] unironic hero is Bobby Ingersoll, a nobody who makes his living driving strip club ads up and down the Strip . . . After accidentally ripping off some gangbangers during a botched robbery, Bobby drops it all on a roll of the dice and suddenly finds himself a multimillionaire with an epiphany: ‘The Dice now owned Bobby. He owed his life to Chance’ . . . An average joe’s free-spirited, madcap romp through the last days of American empire."— Kirkus Reviews, on Random
2025-04-04
An ambitious but aimless street hustler becomes a rolling stone when he’s dragged into a bank job gone awry.
What to make of a character who’s so much like his creator—gifted in weird and dazzling ways, prone to misadventure, and with a persistent habit of talking about his junk? This could be the fictional biography of the verbal half of Penn & Teller had things gone badly wrong once. Here the raconteur injects himself into lead character Poe Legette, a well-meaning ne’er-do-well making his way through the rock ’n’ roll 1970s. Poe is a graduate of clown college—really—who’s raking in fat stacks as a comic juggler in Philly. Things go awry when a pal ropes him into a half-assed bank robbery, during which a bystander is killed. Panicked and on the run, he heads for the first place that comes to mind: Hibbing, Minnesota, birthplace of one Robert Zimmerman, aka Bob Dylan (“I didn’t have a guitar, but I had balls”). There, he changes his name, falls in love with an implausibly oversexed librarian named Marion, and reinvents himself as a Renaissance Faire axe-juggler. But when the consequences of his actions follow him to his newly adopted home, Poe must rely on his loud mouth and quick wits to get out of mortal danger. Since his debut novel,Sock (2004), Jillette has generally married his whip-smart, raunchy sense of humor to hard-boiled plots, but there's less gunplay and femme fatales here than you’d expect from this sort of thing. We do learn lots of fascinating shop talk, from the nuts and bolts of juggling to “cold reading” a mark to crowd work. What remains is a very funny, oft-vulgar cautionary tale that doesn’t pull any punches, even about ol’ Bob himself. “The whole idea of genius,” Poe scoffs. “Everything is just hard work. Everything is juggling.”
A fast-talking, ball-juggling tall tale about long shots, escape attempts, and other bad decisions.
