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Be Ready When the Luck Happens
by Ina Garten
A lounge chair beside a pool in Florida, where I was vacationing with my family last winter, was the perfect place to devour Garten’s celebration of luxury, good food, and togetherness. This memoir is a record of a life spent prioritizing adventure over prudence, indulgence over temperance. Garten buys a store in a town she’s never visited, purchases a beautiful house she can barely afford, and wishes her husband well as he takes a job in Hong Kong while she stays behind. Her brio pays off, of course: That food shop was a success, and she went on to write more than a dozen cookbooks, become a Food Network star, and make pavlova with Taylor Swift. The book is escapist in the way that good, breezy reads often are. It was also, for me, inspiring: Be Ready When the Luck Happens gave me a bit of permission to imagine what I would do if I were the sort of person who embraces possibility the way Garten does. As I basked in the pleasant winter sunshine, I found myself thinking, What if we move to Florida, or to Southern California, or some other place where it’s warm in January? I haven’t followed through—vacation fantasies have a way of fading as soon as you get back to reality. But I was invigorated by imagining that I might. — Eleanor Barkhorn
Be Ready When the Luck Happens
by Ina Garten
The Hole
by Hye-Young Pyun, translated by Sora Kim-Russell
The less you know going into The Hole, the better; don’t even read the book jacket. I promise you’ll still be walloped by every revelation in this story, from its opening scene of the narrator Oghi looking up, confused and groggy, at a fluorescent ceiling, to its last, when he stares up at a dark sky. In between is a slow accumulation of quiet disturbances, as Oghi, an insecure middle-aged academic, moves from one physical location to another and then from memory to memory to deeper memory. He revisits his relationships with his wife and mother-in-law, who are the two other pillars of the novel (though never addressed by name). Settings of comfort—a bedroom, a flower garden, a backyard barbecue with friends—turn into sites of distress. Banal scenes later flood with meaning. The Hole uses simple prose to reach the edges of Oghi’s trapped mind, dropping clues and red herrings about its characters’ mistakes. What has Oghi done with his life? What has Oghi done, exactly? Dive into this claustrophobic book when you feel freest, momentarily untethered from responsibility, perhaps looking at an infinite horizon. You’ll feel the contrast in your bones. — Shan Wang
The Hole
by Hye-Young Pyun, translated by Sora Kim-Russell
Great Black Hope
by Rob Franklin
At the outset, the premise of Franklin’s debut novel just sounds like a typical Labor Day weekend in Southampton: David Smith is arrested for possession of cocaine, and his father—a former university president also named David—hires a local lawyer to help clear his record. But as “the David Smiths” embark on their mission, the stakes escalate. The body of the younger David’s socialite roommate, Elle, was found near the East River three weeks earlier, and the investigation into her death has stalled. His best friend, Carolyn, is busy juggling drug binges, sobriety programs, and ill-advised affairs. And most of the players, including the Davids, are members of an American Black elite whose privilege feels precarious, and whose children, Franklin observes, either “adopt the twice-as-good ethos of their parents’ generation or rebel and in that rebellion sacrifice themselves.” The author bakes the subgenres of party-monster satire, tabloid procedural, and Black coming-of-age into a richly layered inquiry into how to live a good life. If Tom Wolfe, Jay McInerney, and Margo Jefferson somehow collaborated, this might have been the delightful result. — B. K.
Great Black Hope
by Rob Franklin
Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One
by Kristen Arnett
Cherry Hendricks wants to be a clown—well, a successful one: She dreams of reliable, full-time work where she can take her craft seriously, instead of cobbling together pet-store shifts and birthday parties in the wealthy neighborhoods of Orlando, Florida. Unfortunately, she has yet to hit it big, so her days are defined by her troubles with money and her emotionally distant mother, problems made only worse by the death of her brother. In between her shots at clowning stardom, Cherry makes impressive chains of bad decisions—most of them being illicit hookups with older women. But her passion for her art is unwavering no matter what new mess she puts herself in, and key to the novel’s charm. Cherry’s serious treatment of clownery transforms shiny pants and greasepaint from punch lines into the venerated tools of her trade. It allows Arnett to develop moving ideas about identity, performance, and comedy—as well as how it feels to love something (or someone, or somewhere) that doesn’t necessarily love you back. — Elise Hannum
Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One
by Kristen Arnett
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