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

abi a

 I was under the impression that I loved him, simply because I never knew what he was thinking.

Am I some kind of destroyer? Privately, men are concerned with self-preservation. I guess I, too, only feel desirable when I'm holding back, when I keep something for myself.

When men are in the kitchen, it is considered work, and when women are in the kitchen, it's considered duty. That's why there are so few women chefs in duty. restaurants. The kitchen is hostile territory. It's a wonder nice things come out of it.

I do wonder whether my memories should stay only mine, or have they ever been? Each time I tell someone a story over a watery Pernod, it opens that someone to the possibility of the memory; that's why I adore talking. Then maybe the stories really are mine, not because they happened to me but because of the indelible details I give. Maybe it is the how that makes them valuable. 

Helen 

Seeing someone you used to love is like visiting a house you once lived in. Everything about them is familiar yet strange. The greater the distance between you, the more unbelievable they seem. Maybe I have always been involved in some kind of fieldwork.

People love Paris, but they forget it smells like a urinal. Being there is like paying someone to be rude to you and deciding to like it. 

If only I could exist as perfect lightness, always laughing with my mouth open. I would float through life with ease, believing in my own unserious personality. It takes no effort to convince people you are in fact just that. They start to expect that of you, and nothing more.

Beauty is a funny thing. It fools you imto ing you like someone when really all you want is to possess them. Ultimately, I guess that's what desire is. 

I have tried to stitch together tendernes trom each person. Wring them of it. I want all the tender- ness in the world. It's a natural urge to want to be important in someone's life. The soft underbelly of a coarse man. A preview is never enough because I am insatiable. 

Beauty is a funny thing. It fools you into thinking you like someone when really all you want is to possess them.

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