Child Boss follows a young boy who’s dedicated to becoming a tenacious baller. But his overworked mother can’t afford to nourish his dreams by giving him exposure to top talent, and his highly educated father doesn’t make money. This leads the boy to seek work at twelve.

Playful and unflinching, Child Boss throws its narrator into the humiliations and pains of being a worker. Moving between desire, free markets, debt, basketball courts, private golf courses, family arguments, school, high-revving engines, and subversive humor, the novel probes how a young boy metabolizes and resists a world marred by precarity, labor, competition, value, and exchange.

Child Boss obliterates and reconfigures the boundaries between boyhood and manhood, boss and worker, kindness and exploitation, public and private life, tenderness and brutality. It creates openings to interrogate how social, cultural, and economic rituals of domination seep into and structure daily life. It asks: How might we intervene and develop alternatives to the overbearing weight of capitalism and what it does to people? How can we nourish rituals that reward connection and humanity, not extraction and dehumanization?

Andrew Felsher is the author of Notes from a Prison Cell (Bottlecap Press, 2023) and Child Boss (128 LIT, 2026). He lives in New York City.

"Child boss is a riveting and piercingly honest book that reminds us, with so much sweetness and bitterness, of the beauty and toil of a child's world truncated by the brutal responsibility of adulthood. Felsher has written a truly resonant and remarkable book. This book sings, troubles the water of desire and dreams. A gift of a read!" — Saddiq Dzukogi, Author of Bakandamiya: An Elegy

"Child Boss is a wildly playful meditation on childhood, sports, and masculinity. It's also a serious interrogation of late capitalism. Felsher's writing is fresh and inventive, a delight to read, for both its small surprises and full revelations. A remarkable debut, Child Boss recalls the dark absurdity in Robert Walser's fictions, but Felsher's vision is entirely his own." — René Steinke, Author of Holy Skirts & Friendswood

"To be a baller is to probe that space between failures and dreams." — Mona Kareem, Author of I Will Not Fold These Maps

"Felsher's honesty is grotesque and wonderful, the narrative driving and hilarious. The pain of adolescent boyhood is laid bare, with a blast radius that reaches far and wide, and will have the reader wincing and laughing. Highly enjoyable, unputdownable, emotional, and funny." — Donna Freitas, Author of Her One Regret and The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano.

"Child Boss works on a multitude of levels. Blurring the lines between memoir, autofiction and coming-of-age novel, Andrew Felsher delves into his young protagonist's insatiable hunger for basketball and forays into erstwhile entrepreneurship as he navigates the bewildering terrain of personal and professional relationships. Set in a world where transaction and competition supersede connection and cooperation, Child Boss investigates the boundaries of debt and forgiveness, of public and private life, and offers a scathing account of the ways masculinity shapes identity under late capitalism. Propelled forward by Felsher's lucid, precise prose, this is as tender a book as it is an unflinching and audacious one, blending humour, pathos and strangeness in ways that surprise, subvert, upend, transgress. A striking, memorable, and incisive book." — Lisa Richter, Lisa Richter, Author of Nautilus and Bone & Sublunary

"Sharp and subversive, Child Boss transforms the sweetness of adolescent hustle into a witty critique of labor and debt. With biting humor and philosophical poise, Felsher reveals the comedy and precarity at the heart of growing up on the margins of privilege and power." — Elton Uliana, Literary Critic and Translator, University College London

"Child Boss balances daringly on the precipice between childhood and adulthood, where money becomes a source of motivation, power, and inequality. Felsher sees the world and begins to imagine how to steer it in a different direction." — Danika Stegeman Lemay, Author of Ablation