Reading, Q&A, signing 828 Broadway (at 12^th Street)

New York, NY 10003

Website: http://www.strandbooks.com/

Interview, Q&A, signing

Bryant Park Outdoor Reading Room

42nd Street all¨¦ between 5th & 6th Avenues

Website: http://www.bryantpark.org/things-to-do/reading_room.html

Interview, Q&A, signing

1717 North Harwood – Horchow Auditorium

Dallas, TX 75201

Website: http://dallasmuseumofart.org/Events/ArtsLettersLive/FreshInk/index.htm

Speech, Q&A, signing

5342 Tilly Mill Road

Dunwoody, GA 30338

Website: http://www.atlantajcc.org/pldb-live/special-events/11199/?back=pldb_active

Interview, Q&A, signing 400 Cathedral Street — Wheeler Auditorium, 3rd floor

Baltimore, MD 21201

Website: http://www.prattlibrary.org/calendar/atpratt.aspx?id=66978

Speech, reading, and signing Q&A The Music Hall

28 Chestnut Street

Portsmouth, NH 03801

Website: http://www.themusichall.org/calendar/event/ben_mezrich

But what does one do with items so valuable that they’re illegal even to own? And was Thad Roberts – undeniably gifted, picked for one of the most competitive scientific posts imaginable, a possible astronaut – really what he seemed?

SEX ON THE MOON: The Amazing Story Behind the Most Audacious Heist in History (Doubleday; 7/12) is based meticulous research into thousands of pages of court records, FBI transcripts, NASA documents, and interviews with most of the participants in the crime. Ben Mezrich – with his signature high-velocity swagger – has reconstructed the madcap story of genius, love, and duplicity, all centered around a heist that reads like a Hollywood thrill ride.

Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg were Harvard undergraduates and best friends-outsiders at a school filled with polished prep-school grads and long-time legacies. They shared both academic brilliance in math and a geeky awkwardness with women.

Eduardo figured their ticket to social acceptance-and sexual success-was getting invited to join one of the university’s Final Clubs, a constellation of elite societies that had groomed generations of the most powerful men in the world and ranked on top of the inflexible hierarchy at Harvard. Mark, with less of an interest in what the campus alpha males thought of him, happened to be a computer genius of the first order.

Which he used to find a more direct route to social stardom: one lonely night, Mark hacked into the university’s computer system, creating a ratable database of all the female students on campus-and subsequently crashing the university’s servers and nearly getting himself kicked out of school. In that moment, in his Harvard dorm room, the framework for Facebook was born.

What followed-a real-life adventure filled with slick venture capitalists, stunning women, and six-foot-five-inch identical-twin Olympic rowers-makes for one of the most entertaining and compelling books of the year. Before long, Eduardo’s and Mark’s different ideas about Facebook created in their relationship faint cracks, which soon spiraled into out-and-out warfare. The collegiate exuberance that marked their collaboration fell prey to the adult world of lawyers and money. The great irony is that while Facebook succeeded by bringing people together, its very success tore two best friends apart.

After conquering the hallowed halls of Harvard Business School, he enters the testosterone-laced warrens of the Merc Exchange, the asylum-like oil exchange located in Lower Manhattan. A place where billions of dollars trade hands every week, the Merc is like a casino on crack, where former garbage men become millionaires overnight, where fistfights break out on the trading floor and men have been known to bring prostitutes as dates to company dinners.

This ordinary kid has traded Brooklyn for the gold-lined hotel palaces of Dubai. He keeps company on the decks of private yachts in Monte Carlo – teeming with half-naked girls flown in by Saudi Sheiks and makes deals in the dangerous back alleys of Beijing.

But the Merc is just a starting place. Taken under the wing of another young gun and partnering with a mysterious young Muslim, he embarks on a dangerous adventure to revolutionize the oil trading industry – and along with it, the world.

Rigged is the explicit, exclusive, true story behind the headlines that dominate the world stage…

Semyon Dukach was known as the Darling of Las Vegas. A legend at age twenty-one, this cocky hotshot was the biggest high roller to appear in Sin City in decades, a mathematical genius with a system the casinos had never seen before and couldn’t stop – a system that has never been revealed until now; that has nothing to do with card counting, wasn’t illegal, and was more powerful than anything that had been tried before.

Las Vegas. Atlantic City. Aruba. Barcelona. London. And the jewel of the gambling crown – Monte Carlo.

Dukach and his fellow MIT students hit them all and made millions. They came in hard, with stacks of cash, big, seemingly insane, bets, women hanging on their arms, and fake identities. Although they were taking classes and studying for exams during the week, over the weekends they stormed the blackjack tables only to be harassed, banned from casinos, threatened at gunpoint, and beaten in Vegas’s notorious back rooms.

The stakes were high, the dangers very real, but the players were up to the challenges, consequences be damned. There was Semyon Dukach himself, bored with school and broke; Victor Cassius, the slick, brilliant MIT grad student who galvanized the team; Owen Keller, with stunning ability but a dark past that would catch up to him; and Allie Simpson, bright, clever, and a feast for the eyes.

In the classroom, they were geeks. On the casino floor, they were unstoppable.