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Join author David Samuels as he reads and signs from his first two books ONLY LOVE CAN BREAK YOUR HEART and THE RUNNER at Quimby’s.

David has been turning out excellent work for Harper’s, The New Yorker, The American Scholar, and The New York Times Magazine for more than a decade. He is a two-time National Magazine Award finalist for feature writing and reporting; his work has been included in Da Capo Best Music Writing 2000, The Best American Political Reporting 2004, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2006. He was named one of the Columbia Journalism Review’s Ten Best Feature Writers 35 and Under and one of Editor and Publisher’s Fifty Nonfiction Writers to Watch.

ONLY LOVE CAN BREAK YOUR HEART is a collection of David’s magazine work anchored by his funny, wildly inventive accounts of “big events” like Woodstock ’99, Donald Rumsfeld’s press conferences at the Pentagon, a George Bush fund-raiser at a mall in Texas, and Super Bowl XL in Detroit. Recalling the pioneering New Journalism of Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, and Joan Didion, it is a marvelous display of David’s unique reportorial sensitivity and stylistic flair.

THE RUNNER tells the true story of James Hogue, a petty thief who forged his way though the Princeton admission system and excelled at the school until his con was exposed. David first wrote about Hogue in a much-discussed New Yorker article, and here reports what became of Hogue. The book is both a wonderfully involving personal story and an absurdist parable of the college admissions game and the larger pretense of the Ivy League. Through the connections David draws between Hogue’s ambitions and desires and our own, he has made the story of James Hogue an exploration of the slippery nature of personal identity in America and a window into the corruptions of the American dream.

Together these two books form a career-defining set showcasing the work of one of America’s most gifted young journalists.