Reading List

Its pretty good. I like it.

It’s all the rage. It is Gossip Lit: a genre of novels—dubbed by The New York Times as a massive new publishing trend—that offer inquiring minds a tantalizing peek at the rich and powerful behaving badly. In this juicy, irresistible tradition, Broadway Books proudly presents the ultimate summer cocktail with a fresh new recipe: The Perfect Manhattan.

Cassie is a young college graduate with the world on a string, a yen for screenwriting—and a staggering pile of student loans weighing her down. In lieu of the lucrative snooze-fest of a reliable consulting job, she shocks everyone she knows by opting for a sexier, more flexible job: mixing drinks. Never mind that she doesn’t know single-malt whiskey from Jack Daniels: she’s eager to learn. And under the tutelage of a sexy SoHo bar owner, she’s soon cranking out three-olive martinis with the city’s glitterati thirty-deep at the bar.

When she accepts a summer gig bartending in the Hamptons, Cassie finds herself catapulted into a whirlwind of dazzling celebrity and over-the-top wealth unlike anything she’s ever seen. Surrounded by playboys, moguls, spoiled kids, and Paris Hilton clones in strappy stilettos, she soon wonders if playing the ersatz socialite—while trying to actually make a living—is more than she bargained for.

Authors Leanne Shear and Tracey Toomey bartend at hot spots Onieal's in SoHo and the Star Room in the Hamptons, rubbing elbows with the likes of Sean "P. Diddy" Combs and the Hilton sisters. Their uncanny ability to blend blistering social satire—shaken, not stirred—with a healthydose of romance, comedy, and scandal, results in a fast-paced, enormously entertaining look at life on the chichi side of the tracks.