Getting Even/Letting Go

“In ‘Getting Even/Letting Go,’ Julian Tepper gives us Gene Mills, a man desperately trying to squeeze the last morsel out of his failed marriage to a famous painter. Whether that morsel is money, power, something that passes for dignity or his own precarious foothold in the bourgeoisie, Gene isn’t quite sure. Whether you ought to be rooting for him as he rushes toward his ending is never quite settled, either. The one thing certain is that you can’t look away.” – —Will Heinrich, author of The King’s Evil and From Darkness to Darkness
“Darkly comic and razor-sharp, Getting Even/Letting Go is a novel about divorce, money, the art world, and the risks of settling old scores.” – —Svetlana Satchkova, author of The Undead
“Julian Tepper’s Getting Even/Letting Go is like a modern-day Zuckerman novel—as acerbically observant as Roth about divorce and fatherhood and failure and the vagaries of the art market, yet shot through with unexpected pathos. Gene Mills, tragically self-justifying—but maybe justified—will stick with me for a long time, as will the devastating ending.” – —Teddy Wayne, author of The Au Pair and The Winner
“Julian Tepper is New York City’s Sally Rooney, once again bridging the gap between contemporary auto-fiction and what was once called autobiographical fiction with Getting Even/Letting Go, his fifth novel based in his hometown. He is a treasure of a chronicler, a younger, less caustic Philip Roth, a writer who writes each new book as an enticing invitation to witness him unravel and attempt to make sense of his life. Getting Even/Letting Go is Tepper in his best form, traversing the art world of our country’s greatest city, and cautiously, gingerly, exposing his protagonist’s familial travails. It’s both funny and vulnerable, exposing the dark side of an art auction and a family divided. No one moves a story along like Tepper. His writing is so deceptively light and fast, that we don’t know what has hit us until the end. Tremendously fun and absolutely heartbreaking.”

– —Paula Bomer, author of The Stalker and Inside Madeleine
“Offering a pitiless dissection of a modern relationship, Tepper shows himself an expert at orchestrating scenes of domestic carnage. This plays out like a hipster Brooklyn version of Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road.” * Publishers Weekly on Cooler Heads *

Julian Tepper’s fifth novel, Getting Even/Letting Go (Rare Bird), will be published in the fall of 2026. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Playboy, Brooklyn Rail, Zyzzyva, Daily Beast, Bomb, Tablet Magazine, The New York Review of Architecture, and elsewhere. His essay, “Locking Down with the Family You’ve Just Eviscerated in a Novel” was a “Notable Essay of 2022” in Best American Essays 2022. He was born and raised in New York City.

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