Fresh Every Hour

Jimmy Martin has the soul of a huckster and the heart of a poet. As press agent for a midwestern amusement park and the theaters that flank it, he conjures publicity stunts so audacious they bend reality itself - all in service of drawing crowds and climbing toward something he glimpsed once in a dream called success. His schemes spiral, his nerve holds, and somehow - improbably - he stumbles toward triumph even as everything threatens to combust spectacularly. But what Jimmy truly wants is Lolita Murphy of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a girl as distant and perfect as the moon. Between him and her lies not only geography but his own ridiculous ambitions, his tendency toward embellishment, and the ever-present possibility that his grand plans will explode in his face. Written by a man who knew these worlds intimately - Toohey was a real-life press agent and Algonquin Round Table founding member who reportedly suggested 'The New Yorker' - this novel captures 1920s America at its most brash, its most optimistic, its most gloriously absurd. It's a love story dressed in a sandwich board, a comedy that sneaks up and punches you in the gut, a portrait of American nerve as both virtue and vice.