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Akashic Books - Penn Jillette

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113 pages

English

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Publicize to national TV, radio, major dailies, weeklies, alternative publications, literary journals, glossy magazines, film/entertainment media, and blogs
Outside publicist to be hired to supplement Akashic's in-house work with a special focus on national TV (The Late Show, The Tonight Show, The Daily Show; Good Morning America, The Today Show, etc.) and radio shows
Advance galley mailings to top 100 indies across US/Canada
Library mailing to top 30 libraries, with additional outreach to Las Vegas branches
Promotion via author's social media (Jillette has 1.7 million followers on Twitter; "Penn and Teller Live" Instagram account has 132 thousand followers and their Facebook page has 580 thousand followers)
National tour planned for roughly ten cities, submission to major literary festivals

Penn Jillette is one half of the world-famous Emmy Award–winning magic duo Penn & Teller, whose live show is now the longest-running headlining show in Las Vegas.
Penn's weekly podcast Penn’s Sunday School, was the number one downloaded podcast on iTunes during its debut week and was named by iTunes as Best New Comedy Podcast.
Penn is a New York Times best-selling author.
Penn's current hit TV series Penn & Teller: Fool Us! was nominated for a Critic's Choice Award. Penn has appeared on hundreds of TV shows from Fallon to Friends, The Simpsons to Colbert, Modern Family to Big Bang Theory, in addition to Penn & Teller's own specials for NBC, ABC, PBS, and Comedy Central. The controversial Showtime series, Penn & Teller: BS! was nominated for 13 Emmys and was the longest-running series in the history of the network.

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 adventure—a page-turning, scabrous, hilarious ride into randomness."
—Neil Gaiman

"Jillette's latest novel, Random, is about a young man who inherits his father's crushing debt to a loan shark and turns to dice—and other dangerous measures—to 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 Times

Two weeks before his twenty-first birthday, Las Vegas native Bobby Ingersoll finds out he’s 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. Bobby’s prospects of paying off the note, which comes due the day he turns twenty-one, are about as dim as the sign on the hotel’s facade.

The two weeks pass in the blink of a (snake) eye, but before Bobby’s luck runs out, he stumbles upon enough cash to pay off Ruphart and change his family’s 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 power”—what 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 decision—from what to eat to whom to marry to how or when to die—to 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. Jillette’s 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.

Sujets

Fiction

Crime

Informations

Publié par	Akashic Books
Date de parution	11 octobre 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781636140728
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1398€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

RANDOM
PENN JILLETTE
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by Akashic Books
©2022 Penn Jillette
ISBN: 978-1-63614-071-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022931938
All rights reserved
First printing
Akashic Books
Brooklyn, New York
Instagram, Twitter, Facebook: AkashicBooks
E-mail: info@akashicbooks.com
Website: www .akashicbooks .com
As always for:
Emily
Mox
Zolten
And in memory of:
The Great Tomsoni and Company
(This book is my world, and in my world
Johnny and Pam are still alive.)
PREFACE
In everyday life, you will find that your boss, your lover, or your government often try to manipulate you. They propose to you a “game” in the form of a choice in which one of the alternatives appears definitely preferable. Having chosen this alternative, you are faced with a new game, and very soon you find that your reasonable choices have brought you to something you never wanted: you are trapped. To avoid this, remember that acting a bit erratically may be the best strategy. What you lose by making some suboptimal choices, you make up for by keeping greater freedom.
—David Ruelle, Chance and Chaos
The Theory of Our Game: Making a decision promptly is often more important than making the best decision. Committing to and acting with passion on a decision are often more important than which decision is made. Doubt is the weakness. No one can outsmart Random. Random is dangerous.
R OCK /P APER /S CISSORS — LOOK DEEP INTO YOUR OPPO nent’s eyes. She just threw this sequence: rock/rock/paper/rock/scissors/scissors/scissors/paper/rock/rock. You have won five of these last ten throws, including the very last one with your paper. This next one is the tiebreaker, but just a temporary tiebreaker, there will be more ties. You’ve got another ninety throws to go with her; the wager is for the best of one hundred throws. If at the end of those hundred throws you have more wins than she, you get the deed to her house. If she has the most wins, you are going to be homeless. You do not have any nest egg. If you tie at fifty wins each, you both keep your respective houses and you’ve both had a hundred throws of heart-racing excitement. You have both been alive in the here and now for about seventeen minutes, more life than many people experience in a lifetime. The tempo is slow. There is no rush.
Look hard into her eyes. Smell her. Feel the vibe in the room. Psych her out. While looking deep into her eyes, say: “My next throw will be paper , really. Honest. Pinky promise.” Does she believe you? Are you telling the truth? What is her optimum move? What’s your optimum move?
Your best bet is to throw random . In the long run random always wins. Your opponent can’t figure out your process if you have no process. But you can’t naturally throw random . You can’t generate random. No one can. Human minds generate patterns. It’s what they do. It’s what we do. Humans do patterns.
Some professional gamblers memorize π starting at the hundredth decimal place, and use those numbers to make decisions that their opponents can’t possibly predict. Random is power. Completely committing to random would be a superpower.
You throw paper and eventually … you win her house.
1
V EGAS HAS A BIG PYRAMID WITH A LIGHT COMING OUT OF THE TOP. Bobby Ingersoll was born and raised in Las Vegas, the son of a showgirl and a dissolute gambler. Before Bobby’s twenty-first birthday he had never once rolled a twelve on the dice, a roll that would have made him get into full drag to give a professional lap dance. He had occasionally tucked his cock and balls between his legs, put on lipstick, and danced in front of the mirror. But that he’d done just for himself, without any dice telling him to. He had always done what he wanted to do the most, all things considered. He’d made the best decisions he could with the information he had.
Two weeks before his twenty-first birthday he found out his dad, Dave Ingersoll, was over two and half million dollars in debt to Fraser Ruphart, who was the worst of some very, very bad bad guys in Sin City. Ruphart had demanded his money on the first day of June, which was the date Bobby was born.
Happy birthday.
* * *
Very bad guys aren’t fair. Very bad guys are not reasonable. Fraser Ruphart was unfair and unreasonable even by very-bad-guy standards. If Dave Ingersoll owed a good guy two and half million dollars and couldn’t pay, what would happen? Would the good guy just walk away? Maybe a very stupid good guy. Fraser Ruphart was neither very stupid nor very good. He knew the chances that Dave Ingersoll would ever pay off two and a half million dollars, given his entire fucking lifetime, were pretty low. Only Dave Ingersoll would bet on loser odds like that. So Ruphart recognized that a live Dave was only slightly more likely to pay up the two and a half million than a dead Dave. It was like hoping to win the lottery without buying a ticket. Your chances go up an imperceptible amount if you buy a ticket, but they do go up. What made a dead Dave more valuable was the advertising to future customers that they should make sure to pay their debts. But for two and a half million dollars, just killing the deadbeat wouldn’t be enough. For two and a half million bangs for the buck, Ruphart knew, you gotta kill his whole fucking family. That kind of advertising keeps you in first pay position with all your other customers.
Dave Ingersoll’s $2,500,000 debt to Fraser Ruphart came due, in full, on June 1. And on June 2, his whole family—Dave, his wife Kym, his children Bobby and Carolina—would all die. Ruphart might not be that good at figuring out who to loan money to, but he was very good at making the whole families of guys who didn’t pay him get dead. Would the family suffer? Yes. Would there be other very bad stuff happening to Kym and Carolina? Yes. Some of those very bad things would happen to Bobby as well. As the punch line to the old joke goes: “He has chosen death … but first boomsha , (or chi-chi , or boobalooba , or whatever the joke teller has chosen for his imaginary primitive tribe’s nonsense word for horrible, unspeakable, anal gang rape. In this case, it would be all those words right before the final punch line of death).
Do what you want to me but leave my family alone is the message Dave sent to Ruphart. It seemed a fair request between reasonable men, but again, Ruphart was neither fair nor reasonable. And Dave had just sent the worst possible message. When the carny talker out in front on the bally stage says, while gathering the rube crowd— the tip —“Let me warn you, friends, there are pickpockets out there in the crowd, please keep a close watch on your valuables,” the marks check their valuables with a quick reassuring pat. And the pickpockets, who really are in the crowd (and working with the talker), watch and see which pockets to razor to get the wallets. Do what you want to me but leave my family alone is a great way to signal to very bad guys that they should torture , chi-chi , boobalooba , and kill your whole family and do it in front of you. The smart move would have been for Dave to say, How about you kill my whole family, I’ll tell you where to find them, and leave me alone? Dave was a card counter from MIT and blacklisted at every casino as a cheat. If MIT or hard knocks could teach that kind of smart, Dave would have it. He didn’t.
Bobby didn’t want his dad to be killed, he really didn’t, but you can’t always get what you want, and he would have adjusted fairly quickly to his father being dead. He wasn’t ready himself to die on the day after his twenty-first birthday, but being dead is an easy gig once you get there. But even dead Bobby didn’t want his mom and sister boomshaed and killed. To keep himself and the only people he loved alive, Bobby needed to get two and a half million dollars in a couple weeks to pay off his father’s debt. You don’t have to be an MIT mathematician to know that works out to somewhere over a million dollars a week.
2
B OBBY NEVER THOUGHT HIS DAD WOULD BE ANY HELP in motivating him, but Dave had finally come through. Bobby had been motivated to procure two and a half million dollars in a couple weeks. He wasn’t going to earn it even though he had about the best job in Vegas. He drove a truck with a sign on the back advertising a service that would send a live nude dancing girl, or live nude dancing girls, to your private hotel room. He spent his whole shift driving this truck back and forth on the Strip. It’s one of the few truck-driving jobs where being stuck in traffic is considered a good thing. It means people on the street have more time to think, Wait just one single goddamn country minute … an attractive slutty woman or two like that coming to my room to do a sexy dance naked? … Hmmm … Maybe she or they would want to fuck me after she or they were done dancing (the “they” in this case could be either plural or the chosen pronoun whether the rube knew or cared or not), and call the number to book an appointment without doing any other thinking.
The attractive women pictured on the sign didn’t have to worry about dancing, or even going to rooms to pretend (for legal reasons) to dance. The women on the sign were just models. Bobby had nothing to do with the models or the actual “dancers” at all. He was just a truck driver. Bobby would pull any sign. Just the week before, he had pulled a Carrot Top comedy show advertisement and Carrot Top didn’t claim to dance, get nude, or go to anyone’s room—although there’s always a price for everything and Carrot Top’s fee is not unreasonable.
Bobby loved his job. He listened to audiobooks, called friends, illegally texted at lights, and spent time with his thoughts. The truck had Bluetooth for his phone, air-conditioning f