Random

From Penn Jillette of the legendary magic duo Penn & Teller: a rollicking crime caper that will bend your mind like a spoon.Penn Jillette is an atheist, triple-goddamned lunatic, and his book is a glorious Las Vegas lunatic paean to chance and adventurea page-turning, scabrous, hilarious ride into randomness.Neil GaimanJillette's latest novel, Random, is about a young man who inherits his father's crushing debt to a loan shark and turns to diceand other dangerous measuresto dig himself out. That the dice bring him luck sends him a new philosophy of leaving decisions both big and small up to chance. New York TimesTwo weeks before his twenty-first birthday, Las Vegas native Bobby Ingersoll finds out hes inherited a crushing gambling debt from his scumbag father. The debt is owed to an even scummier bag named Fraser Ruphart who oversees his bottom-rung criminal empire from the classy-adjacent Trump International Hotel. Bobbys prospects of paying off the note, which comes due the day he turns twenty-one, are about as dim as the sign on the hotels facade.The two weeks pass in the blink of a (snake) eye, but before Bobbys luck runs out, he stumbles upon enough cash to pay off Ruphart and change his familys fortune. More importantly, he finds himself with a new, for lack of a better word, faith.Bobby does not consign his big break to a higher powerwhat Penn Jillette hero ever could? Instead, he devises and devotes himself to Random, a philosophy where his life choices are based entirely on the roll of his lucky dice. What follows is a rollicking exploration into not so much what defines us as what divines us when we give over every decisionfrom what to eat to whom to marry to how or when to dieto the random fall of two numbered cubes.Random combines the intellectual curiosity of Richard Dawkins with the humor and grit of an Elmore Leonard antihero. Jillettes up-on-his-luck Ingersoll is the character we need to help us navigate the chaos of the post-truth era.Well, unless his roll runs cold.