Penn Jillette's 'Felony Juggler' Is a Mostly-True Account of the Penn & Teller Magician's Life Story (Exclusive) (2025)

• Penn Jillette's new book Felony Juggler tells his life story, but with one major twist
• Jillette tells PEOPLE he was inspired by some of Bob Dylan's stories
• Felony Juggler arrives on May 6

Penn Jillette didn't want to write an autobiography, but he did want to turn stories he's told a hundred times into a book. So in Felony Juggler, out May 6, he "took two major parts of my life, split those apart and put a bank robbery in the middle."

"When I was in high school, I read all the stuff that Bob Dylan made up," Jillette tells PEOPLE in advance of his new novel. "He pretended he worked carnivals and hitchhiked and hopped trains. And I didn't know he made it up, so I did it. And every story, every interaction right up to [my main character] Poe being asked to be a participant in a criminal activity, that's true. And then my answer was different. I said, 'No.' And the character in the book says 'Yes.' "

Felony Juggler follows a Philadelphia street performer in the 1970s who gets involved in a bank heist in which someone gets killed. He skips town, but resurfaces as part of a Renaissance Fair halfway across the country. When the organization behind the heist sniffs him out, he's got to outsmart them.

Jillette, who's performed as half of the legendary magic act Penn & Teller since 1975, had been telling stories of his own time as a nomadic juggler and Renaissance Fair performer for years. So he decided he'd finally write them down.

"It was a little bit too creepy to do an autobiography," he explains. "So I wrote it all for real and then just tacked a story onto it."

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The author began writing the book as Penn & Teller — the longest-running resident headliners in Las Vegas history — looked forward to their act's 50th anniversary, which they're celebrating this year. Some of the book even takes place at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, where Penn & Teller performed their first act.

"Teller always says that the best thing I've ever done is my street act," Jillette adds. "Which, after 50 years of working with Teller, it's interesting that his point of view is you've never got better than before we started working together."

But the book was also a way for Jillette to look back at his career and at all forms of performance, with some clarifying perspective. "There's a sentence that's really important to me that was said by Billy West: 'There's one show business.' And that is a very hard thing to remember," he explains. "It's very hard to remember that mall Santas and Robert De Niro have the same job. Picasso and porn people have the exact same job."

For Jillette, it comes down to keeping the reason he's making art in mind, regardless of the size of the stage or the format of the art itself. "It's important for me to remember that working on Broadway was precisely the same as juggling in the streets. It's the same motivation," he says.

Of course, the timeframe differs between performing a sleight of hand in front of a Las Vegas audience and writing a book that someone may read years later.

"Your motivation is to get that feeling of having communicated something of your heart to an audience, however you perceive them," he adds. "Writing a book is such a different thing because it's so blushingly intimate. It's remarkably intimate. You code the information and then someone decodes it, but it happens just in their minds. And that is really remarkable that you share such a lonely experience."

And as the book hits shelves, Jillette hopes that he's offered readers a good incentive to do that decoding. He's got no illusions about it: There's plenty competing for our attention these days, and even more reasons not to pick up a book at all.

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"I had one [high school] teacher who said 'No one wants to read anything you write. They are all making excuses to not read it,'" Jillette explains, "That's all we do is make excuses to not read things. So you have to make it as easy as possible and take away all those excuses."

Felony Juggler by Penn Jillette is available now, wherever books are sold.