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The powerHouse Arena invites you to a reading and discussion:

Thriller Night

featuring readings from:

A Stranger Like You
by Elizabeth Brundage
and
The Twisted Thread
by Charlotte Bacon

Thursday, July 28, 7–9 PM

Drinks will be served

The powerHouse Arena · 37 Main Street (corner of Water & Main St.) · DUMBO, Brooklyn
For more information, please call 718.666.3049
rsvp@powerHouseArena.com

A Stranger Like You

Madeline Christopher is stuck teaching at a prestigious New England boarding school; Hedda Chase is stuck in a vintage BMW's trunk in an LAX Airport parking lot. Charlotte Bacon and Elizabeth Brundage bring us two hard-boiled thrillers set in vastly different environments featuring extraordinary female protagonists. Join them for drinks, a reading, and conversation.

About A Stranger Like You:

A Stranger Like You, is a troubling, smart, and deadly look at the high-stakes battleground of LA told from three primary points of view: Hugh, portrayed as both a sadistic villain and the fey newcomer dazzled by Hollywood; Hedda, shown as both an ambitious executive and vulnerable victim; and Denny, the local kid and Iraq war vet who just happens to "borrow" Hedda's car, with her locked up in it, and becomes the unlikely hero of our story. It takes us from seedy motels to luxurious film sets in Abu Dhabi; from the sacrifices made by a woman with power to the stories of a runaway from South Dakota on the streets of LA; and an Iraqi exchange student who is desperate to tell the truth about her country at any cost.

As always, Brundage's characters are complicated, surprising, and intense; her themes thought-provoking. But with A Stranger Like You, Brundage reaches a new velocity and focus.

Elizabeth Brundage

About the Author:

Elizabeth Brundage holds an MFA from the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she received a James Michener Award. Before attending Iowa, she was a screenwriting fellow at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. Her short fiction has been published in The Greensboro Review, Witness, and New Letters. Her first two novels, Somebody Else's Daughter and The Doctor's Wife, were also published by Viking. She lives with her family in New York State.

About The Twisted Thread:

a Twisted Thread

PEN/Hemingway Award winner Charlotte Bacons's new novel, The Twisted Thread (Voice/Hyperion; June 14, 2011; $14.99), conjures up a New England town divided between the privileged children attending Armitage Academy, and those whose working-class families living in Greenville, a factory town near the school. It's an institution whose graduates can go to the best of colleges, a place that touts its history of inclusion, accepting the best of the working-class students in the town and bestowing on them the same exalted academic future and status as any of their wealthier students.

Two weeks before her graduation from the famed private school, the icy society beauty Claire Harkness is discovered dead in her dorm room. She was the "It Girl" of the academy—an "A" student, flawless in every way. Her death—and the subsequent discovery that a baby she had birthed in the dorms is now missing—will reveal fault lines that extend through the school's past and the belief that privilege matters shared by both the school's denizens and the townies down the hill.

Madeline Christopher, an intern teacher, is anything but the Armitage Academy model. She may be smart and literary, but she is messy, from her unruly hair to her often wrinkled clothing. She knows that she was offered the temporary job only because her sister, an Armitage alum, who is everything she's not: admired, poised, and successful. In the aftermath of the tragedy, Madeline finds that it is exactly her outsider status that gives her entrée into both the uglier rites of passage wielded by the more powerful of the students, and to the politics of the working-class town. As everyone from students to parents tries to make sense of the murder and the missing baby, it will be Madeline and the detective Matt Correlli, a townie who was once an Armitage student, who will slowly unravel the truth.

A gripping novel about privilege and its price, The Twisted Thread lyrically captures the secret world of teenagers, the painful transit into adulthood, and the sometimes deadly side of love and power.

About the Author:

Charlotte Bacon's previously published books include Lost Geography, There Is Room for You, and Split Estate. Her debut collection of stories, Private State, won the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction in 1998.


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For more information, please contact Lena Valencia, Events Coordinator:
powerHouse Arena, 37 Main Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201
tel: 718.666.3049 fax: 212.366.5247 email: lena@powerHouseArena.com