Virtual Event: Marlowe Granados

Harvard Book Store's virtual event series and GrubStreet welcome MARLOWE GRANADOS—co-host of The Mean Reds podcast and author of The Baffler advice column "Design for Living"—for a discussion of her debut novel, Happy Hour. She will be joined in conversation by STEPHANIE LACAVA, author of The Superrationals and the forthcoming I Fear My Pain Interests You.

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While payment is not required, we are suggesting a $5 contribution to support this author series, our staff, and the future of Harvard Book Store—a locally owned, independently run Cambridge institution. In addition, by purchasing a copy of Happy Hour on harvard.com, you support indie bookselling and the writing community during this difficult time.

About Happy Hour

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. 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. Resources run ever tighter and the strain tests their friendship as they try to convert their social capital into something more lasting than 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 is a novel about getting by and looking great in a system that wants you to do neither.

Praise for Happy Hour

“Marlowe Granados’s Happy Hour is as refreshing as a gin fizz. It is a wild careening joyride through a hot sultry summer in New York in 2013, and it evokes that time with such sparkling specificity that you can feel the heat coming off the pavement.” —Rachel Syme, New Yorker staff writer

“A dreamy account of one heady summer, Marlowe Granados’s début is a dispatch from another land; not only New York City, but youth itself. Happy Hour is aptly titled—it’s an intoxicating book, at once heartbreaking and joyful.” —Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind

“Happy Hour is filled with charm, memorable insight, and witty aperçus, adding up to the realization that life, while unfair, is antic enough to be worth all the trouble.” —A. S. Hamrah, author of The Earth Dies Streaming