OWEN GREENWALD & PAUL KIVELSON at Books Inc. Palo Alto

Join Owen Greenwald and Paul Kivelson at Books Inc. Mountain View for a reading, discussion, and signing of their novel Weapons of the Mind!

In a galaxy of strange aliens and hostile humans, danger casts its shadow on every wall. Friendships are forged, lost, and tested. And the lies that keep the galaxy running just might be about to come crashing down.

Master your emotions. Perform your duty. Follow the Tenets. Tala has lived these rules for twenty years: the rules of an Enhancer. Then a mission goes wrong, and she finds herself framed, branded Renegade, and called to face judgment. Fleeing means violating the Tenets, the moral precepts of her order. Yet in that moment, she finds she cannot stay.

Hunted by the endless forces of the Galactic Coalition and her own mentor, famed Renegade killer Exemplar Scratch, Tala will pursue the proof of her innocence to the very heart of the galaxy. But cling as she might to the tatters of her honor, she cannot deny the true purpose of her mission: revenge. And the further Tala strays from the Tenets' path, the greater the risk she runs of losing herself.

In a galaxy of strange aliens and hostile humans, danger casts its shadow on every wall. Friendships are forged, lost, and tested. And the lies that keep the galaxy running just might be about to come crashing down.

Weapons of the Mind is an awesome work of world-building, conjuring original territories, traditions, technologies, politics, and follies. But as the title promises, it's also a powerful work of mind-building. The narrative viewpoint threads from consciousness to consciousness, among human and alien "sapients," each with a unique grasp of a reality that's never exactly what it seems. The action alone would have kept me turning the pages, and I'm hotly anticipating the further adventures of Tala and her crew (and their minds) in next installment of the Renegades Trilogy. But Greenwald and Kivelson, in their seamlessly blended and masterful prose, add real moral and emotional depth to the action. Their obvious care for this fully realized world becomes the reader's. - Michael Macrone

Paul Kivelson studied creative writing at Stanford with his undergraduate advisor Adam Johnson. His fiction has been published in the Adelaide Literary Magazine and the Schuylkill Valley Journal. Currently, he is pursuing a masters degree in family therapy. But he is best known for his love of board games and his tendency to world-build more ideas than he'd ever possibly have time to write.

Owen B. Greenwald is the author of the six-book series The Big Bet. A Brown University graduate, Owen now resides in the California Bay Area with his wife and a very spoiled dog. Aside from writing, Owen enjoys ballroom dance, historical reenactment, experimenting with new recipes, parodying songs, and amateur theatre (watching, scripting, performing in.), and is constantly discovering new side projects to be distracted by. His Shakespeare-inspired play Midsummer Night received the 2015 Weston Fine Arts award for excellence in playwriting. He did his best to choose a vocation that wouldn't be rendered obsolete by AI and every day gets more worried that he chose poorly.

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