Random

by Penn Jillette

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781636140711
Publisher:	Akashic Books
Publication date:	10/11/2022
Pages:	264
Sales rank:	70,706
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Penn Jillette is a cultural phenomenon as a solo personality and as half of the world-famous Emmy Award–winning magic duo Penn & Teller, whose live show spent years on Broadway and is now the longest-running headlining show in Las Vegas. The pair have their own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Jillette cohosted the Showtime series Penn & Teller: Bullshit! which was nominated for thirteen Emmy Awards and won him a Writers Guild Award. He currently cohosts the CW Network competition series Penn & Teller: Fool Us! His 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. He is the author of numerous books, including the nonfiction New York Times best-selling books Presto!: How I Made Over 100 Pounds Disappear and Other Magical Tales and God No!: Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales; the novel Sock; and the essay collection Every Day Is an Atheist Holiday!

Editorial Reviews

08/01/2022

Jillette (Presto!), the magician best known as the verbal half of Penn and Teller, unveils an entertaining Las Vegas picaresque. The protagonist, Bobby Ingersoll, is the child of a showgirl and a gambler. His father, Dave, has placed the entire clan in jeopardy by racking up over $2.5 million in debt to the dangerous Fraser Ruphart. With two weeks to go before the debt is due, Bobby happens upon the aftermath of a street fight and finds a bag containing more than $500,000. His good fortune continues when he bets almost that entire windfall at a casino and wins enough to pay off Fraser. Then, Bobby decides that rolling a pair of dice will decide his next choices. A series of entertaining episodes ensue: he tags along with an underwriter of high-stakes promotional betting after meeting the man on a plane, and opens a detective agency for people whose luck has run out. Jillette cleverly addresses the unlikely material, noting how screenwriters often “hang a lamp” on their implausible plot points (he cites Bruce Willis in Die Hard 2: “How can the same thing happen to the same guy again?”). Jillette’s acerbic wit and perfect pacing keep this afloat. Readers will hope Jillette has more fiction up his sleeves. Agent: Steve Fisher, APA Talent and Literary. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"Random is everything you would hope from Penn Jillette and so much more. Random numbers are seemingly crazy, unconnected, and unpredictable: this fabulous, wondrously compelling, funny, and original novel is all that too. As for laughs—it passed the the fling-up-the-head-snort-and-slap-the-thigh test a dozen times in the first few pages alone. Hugely recommended."
—Stephen Fry, actor/writer

"Bravo, Bobby Ingersoll. Encore, Penn Jillette!"
—Debbie Harry

"Jillette (Presto!), the magician best known as the verbal half of Penn and Teller, unveils an entertaining Las Vegas picaresque . . . Jillette's acerbic wit and perfect pacing keep this afloat. Readers will hope Jillette has more fiction up his sleeves."
—Publishers Weekly

"Jillette is one of our weirder national treasures. [His] unironic hero is Bobby Ingersoll, a nobody who makes his living driving strip club ads up and down the Strip . . . After accidentally ripping off some gangbangers during a botched robbery, Bobby drops it all on a roll of the dice and suddenly finds himself a multimillionaire with an epiphany: 'The Dice now owned Bobby. He owed his life to Chance'  . . . An average joe's free-spirited, madcap romp through the last days of American empire." 
—Kirkus Reviews

"Penn Jillette is half of Penn & Teller, the longest-running magic show in Las Vegas. This is his crime-fiction debut, and he has put together a wild story set in Sin City that is sinfully diverting . . . [A] crackerjack caper."
—Booklist

"The reader on your list who loves to laugh will thoroughly enjoy Random by Penn Jillette. It's the story of an almost-twenty-one-year-old who inherits a pile of debt from his horrible father, and it's due to the (even more horrible) loan shark when the guy turns 21. Will a roll of the dice eliminate all his problems? Lucky is the person who gets this book, to find out."
—QSaltLake Magazine, Holiday Gift Guide

"As conjured up by Penn Jillette, master magician and best-selling author of both fiction and nonfiction, Random takes us on a crazy, dizzy, and inventive journey in which Las Vegas born and bred Bobby Ingersoll opts to let Chance guide his life . . . Like a night in Vegas experienced with a buzz on, this all becomes a tipsy ride . . . Entertaining reading for anyone who likes a gamble."
—Mystery Scene

"[Random] is the story of Bobby Ingersoll, who finds himself responsible for his father's gambling debts, and who places his faith—or something like it—in 'Random,' the philosophy of basing life choices entirely on the roll of his 'lucky' pair of dice. What follows is a rollicking exploration of what happens 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." 
—Tulsa World

"The book explored an interesting story that could have gone very differently if someone actually tried to live by the dice in this manner, but then again, if Bobby's life had immediately crashed and burned, it would not have made for a very interesting novel."
—Game Vortex 

"Random, is a corker about a Vegas guy in a tight spot who has a stroke of luck—and turns it into a life philosophy. It hits the world on Oct. 11— place a bet on it."
—J.D. Heyman, CultureWag

From the Publisher

2022-07-27
After a near miss with a vicious Las Vegas gangster leads to good fortune, a truck driver abandons his fate to chance.

Jillette is one of our weirder national treasures, having graduated from MTV–era oddball to perpetual residency in Vegas, but he’s also written delightful mongrels like his 2004 comic noir Sock. Here, the writer turns to that which he knows, specifically the bizarro fishbowl that is Sin City, the weird science of percentages, and games of chance. Our unironic hero is Bobby Ingersoll, a nobody who makes his living driving strip club ads up and down the Strip. Bobby might have remained a nobody if his pops hadn’t gotten in deep with gangster Fraser Ruphart to the tune of $2.5 million and some change. After accidentally ripping off some gangbangers during a botched robbery, Bobby drops it all on a roll of the dice and suddenly finds himself a multimillionaire with an epiphany: “The Dice now owned Bobby. He owed his life to Chance. He had a superpower under our yellow sun. Bobby knew and accepted that life was Random. Bobby was enlightened. Siddhartha was dead. Bobby was Buddha.” Rolling the dice to make all of life’s extraneous decisions gives Bobby some much-needed joy but also inevitably gets him into trouble. Not that he doesn’t have a lot of fun first, although whether it’s to readers’ amusement or dismay may depend on their personal appetites for vice and folly. Among other misadventures, all punctuated by Jillette’s sardonic cultural asides and math lessons, Bobby gets a full-body tattoo, learns a few lessons in sexual fluidity, romances a gold-digging grifter, and buys a private detective agency so he can become a wealthy crime fighter. You know, like Batman. But even Batman probably didn’t count on a client whose case is rattling the cage of a dangerous casino heist crew, the unlikely return of Ruphart, and a showdown at the Trump International Hotel.

An average joe's free-spirited, madcap romp through the last days of American empire.

Kirkus Reviews

Random is everything you would hope from Penn Jillette and so much more. Random numbers are seemingly crazy, unconnected, and unpredictable: this fabulous, wondrously compelling, funny, and original novel is all that too. As for laughs—it passed the the fling-up-the-head-snort-and-slap-the-thigh test a dozen times in the first few pages alone. Hugely recommended.”

Stephen Fry

Bravo, Bobby Ingersoll. Encore, Penn Jillette!”

singer songwriter and actor Debbie Harry