Marlowe Granados

Refreshing and wry in equal measure, Happy Hour is an intoxicating novel of youth well spent. Isa Epley is all of twenty-one years old, and already wise enough to understand that the purpose of life is the pursuit of pleasure. After a sojourn across the pond, she arrives in New York City for a summer of adventure with her best friend, one newly blond Gala Novak. They have little money, but that’s hardly going to stop them from having a good time.

In her diary, Isa describes a sweltering summer in the glittering city. By day, the girls sell clothes in a market stall, pinching pennies for their Bed-Stuy sublet and bodega lunches. By night, they weave from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side to the Hamptons among a rotating cast of celebrities, artists, Internet entrepreneurs, stuffy intellectuals, and bad-mannered grifters. Money runs ever tighter and the strain tests their friendship as they try to convert their social capital into something more lasting than their precarious gigs as au pairs, nightclub hostesses, paid audience members, and aspiring foot fetish models. Through it all, Isa’s bold, beguiling voice captures the precise thrill of cultivating a life of glamour and intrigue as she juggles paying her dues with skipping out on the bill.

Happy Hour announces a dazzling new talent in Marlowe Granados, whose exquisite wit recalls Anita Loos’s 1925 classic, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, updated to evoke a recent, golden period of hope and transformation—the summer of 2013. A cri de cœur for party girls and anyone who has ever felt entitled to an adventure of their own, Happy Hour is an effervescent tonic for the ails of contemporary life.

Happy Hour

Anita Loos

Some might call Lorelei Lee lucky. Others, names she would not even put in her diary. Life in New York is becoming routine, so when her wealthy companion Mr. Eisman suggests that “a girl with brains ought to do something else with them besides think,” Lorelei is up to the challenge.

Accompanied by her best friend Dorothy Shaw, Lorelei chronicles the sights and people of Europe in her diary in a consistent mix of hilarity and accidental wisdom--“Paris is divine” and “London is really nothing at all.” Reliant on the good graces of the gentlemen around them to stay afloat as they await Eisman’s arrival on the continent, Lorelei and Dorothy skirt unscathed and at times oblivious around scorned and greedy lovers, plots of Francophone thievery, and even murder charges.

This hilarious, rip-roaring travelogue is a sharp-eyed takedown of the hypocrisy of Prohibition, the Roaring Twenties, and anyone foolish enough to stake their wallet on the dumb blonde stereotype. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is more than a guilty pleasure--it is a literary classic.

Marlowe Granados

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