Amy Hempel and Jill Ciment as A.J. Rich

discuss

The Hand That Feeds You:
A Novel

This event includes a book signing

Date

Jul
21
Tuesday
July 21, 2015
7:00 PM ET

Location

Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138

Tickets

This event is free; no tickets are required.

UPDATE: Jill Ciment will not be attending tonight's event. She sends her regrets. 

Harvard Book Store welcomes acclaimed authors AMY HEMPEL and JILL CIMENT for a reading from their novel, The Hand That Feeds You, written under the pseudonym "A.J. Rich."

The Hand That Feeds You is a smart, thrilling, sexy, and emotionally riveting novel of psychological suspense about an accomplished woman involved with a man who proves to be an imposter.

Morgan Prager, at age thirty, is completing her thesis on victim psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. She is newly engaged to Bennett, a seductive but possessive and secretive man. She returns from class one day to find Bennett mauled to death, and her dogs—a Great Pyrenees and two pit bulls she has rescued—covered in blood. Bewildered and devastated that her dogs could have committed such violence, she worries that she might suffer from one of the syndromes she studies: pathological altruism, when selfless acts do more damage than good.

When Morgan tries to locate Bennett’s parents to tell them about their son’s hideous death, she discovers he was not the man he said he was. Everything he has told her—where he was born, where he lives and works—was a lie. In fact, he has several fiancées, and fits the clinical definition of a sociopath. And then, one by one, these other women are murdered. Suddenly Morgan’s research into Bennett takes on the urgency of survival: to stay alive, she must find out who is killing the women Bennett was closest to.

Unsettling and highly suspenseful, this is a brilliant collaboration between two outstanding writers.

Amy Hempel
Amy Hempel

Amy Hempel

Amy Hempel is the author of The Dog of the Marriage, Tumble Home, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, Reasons to Live, the coeditor of Unleashed, and a recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Ambassador Book Award for Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and numerous grants from Yaddo. Her stories have appeared in Harper’s, Vanity Fair, GQ, Tin House, The Harvard Review, The Quarterly, and have been widely anthologized, including in Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at Bennington College, and at Stony Brook Southampton.

Photo Credit: Vicky Topaz

Jill Ciment
Jill Ciment

Jill Ciment

Jill Ciment is the author of Small Claims, a collection of stories and novellas; The Law of Falling Bodies, Teeth of the Dog, The Tattoo Artist, Heroic Measures, and Act of God, novels; and Half a Life, a memoir. She has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a NEA Japan Fellowship Prize, two New York State Fellowships for the Arts, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.  Ciment is a professor at the University of Florida. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, and Brooklyn, New York.

Photo Credit: Arnold Mesches

Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138

Walking from the Harvard Square T station: 2 minutes

As you exit the station, reverse your direction and walk east along Mass. Ave. in front of the Cambridge Savings Bank. Cross Dunster St. and proceed along Mass. Ave for three more blocks. You will pass Au Bon Pain, JP Licks, and TD Bank. Harvard Book Store is located at the corner of Mass. Ave. and Plympton St.

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