CHAT with C.J. Farley
”Who Knows You By Heart”
Thursday, January 22
6pm, Online through Zoom
Part social thriller, part modern love story, Who Knows You by Heart is a sly, witty, and endlessly discussable tale of Big Tech, new money, relationships, race, and discovering what’s real in an age of artificial intelligence.
Octavia Crenshaw, a Jamaican-American coder living in Manhattan, is broke, burned out, and haunted by her parents’ deaths. Desperate to pay off some debts, she ditches her nonprofit job for a high-paying gig at Eustachian Inc., a Big Tech company that specializes in audio entertainment. Language, communication, human connection—these are the markets Eustachian wants to revolutionize...and dominate.
Octavia finds herself swept up in the world of the Tech Titans, with its lure of instant riches and its seemingly limitless future. But as one of Eustachian’s very few Black employees, Octavia is uncomfortably aware of things that seem to escape her coworkers: unexplained tech glitches, cryptic remarks, a mysterious secret floor in the corporation’s gleaming headquarters.
But she sets her suspicions aside when she’s recruited by another Black coder—the infuriating but attractive Walcott—to collaborate on a secret project code-named Zion. Zion is a new kind of AI-powered storytelling, one that’s programmed to be free from the racist and sexist biases that plague other AI products. Zion could launch Eustachian into a bold new future and make its developers super rich while righting all kinds of injustices. Octavia and Walcott’s excitement over their creation sets off romantic sparks between the two of them, until they discover a toxic secret about their employer—something that they can’t unlearn, or overlook, but must overcome.
photo credit: Kate Simon
C. J. Farley is the author of “Who Knows You By Heart,” which The New York Times called “an era-defining novel.” Part social thriller, part modern love story, “Who Knows You by Heart” is a tale of Big Tech, new money, relationships, race, and discovering what’s real in an age of artificial intelligence. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, and raised in Brockport, New York, Farley graduated from Harvard University and served as an editor of the Harvard Lampoon. Farley’s novel “Around Harvard Square” won an NAACP Image Award and his biography “Before the Legend: The Rise of Bob Marley” was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Farley co-wrote and co-edited the book “The Blues” with Martin Scorsese and was consulting producer on the Peabody-winning HBO documentary “Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown.” His biography “Aaliyah: More Than a Woman” was adapted into a hit TV movie for Lifetime. Farley, a former senior editor for The Wall Street Journal and a former music critic for Time magazine, has interviewed some of the greatest musicians in the world, including Aretha Franklin, Taylor Swift, Prince, Beyoncé, Jay-Z and Bob Dylan. Farley has also worked as an Executive Editor at Amazon Inc.’s Audible.
Castle Hill Author Talk (CHAT)
Join us for a series of provocative and entertaining discussions with some of today’s most talented and creative authors. In a series of live, one-hour events, host Karen Dukess, author of The Last Book Party, will interview acclaimed, debut, and award-winning authors of fiction and non-fiction about their new books and their paths to publication. Available individually or as a series, the interviews will include time for questions from the audience. Events are FREE although donations greatly appreciated!
About the Host:
Karen Dukess, who has hosted the Castle Hill Author Talks since 2021, is the author of the IndieNext and Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers pick THE LAST BOOK PARTY and WELCOME TO MURDER WEEK. She has been a newspaper reporter in Florida, a magazine publisher in Russia, and a speechwriter on gender equality for the United Nations. She has a degree in Russian Studies from Brown University and a Master's in Journalism from Columbia University. She lives with her family near New York City and spends as much time as possible in Truro on Cape Cod.