When Weaver Walquist tries to dissuade Kim Lindgren from having an abortion, he agrees to help her through the pregnancy and the two youngsters fall in love during the process

She Needed Me

Literature & Fiction

Walter Kirn

Humor & Satire

Pocket_Books

Markus's vivid memories of raising his fists, mano a mano, led him into the working-class barrios of Havana, Mexico City, Brooklyn, and Dublin, where the odds against celebrity and high-stakes prize fighting belie the drive that motivates these young men. In a series of intimate portraits infused with purpose, determination, and the physical and emotional struggles of intense training, Markus gives a more human face to a sport that rewards only those from its highest ranks. Far from the bright lights and stereotyped fame, these young fighters possess unrivaled dignity and grace.

Boxers

Arts & Photography

Kurt Markus

Nelson Algren

Photography & Video

Twin Palms Pub

Blood Will out

Corsair

In the summer of 1998, Walter Kirn--then an aspiring novelist struggling with impending fatherhood and a dissolving marriage--set out on a peculiar, fateful errand: to personally deliver a crippled hunting dog from his home in Montana to the New York apartment of one Clark Rockefeller, a secretive young banker and art collector who had adopted the dog over the Internet. Thus began a 15-year relationship that drew Kirn deep into the fun-house world of an outlandish, eccentric son of privilege who ultimately would be unmasked as a brazen serial impostor, child kidnapper, and brutal murderer. Kirn's one-of-a-kind story of being duped by a real-life Mr. Ripley takes us on a bizarre and haunting journey from the posh private clubrooms of Manhattan to the hard-boiled courtrooms and prisons of Los Angeles. As Kirn uncovers the truth about his friend, a psychopath masquerading as a gentleman, he also confronts hard truths about himself. Why, as a writer of fiction, was he susceptible to the deception of a sinister fantasist whose crimes, Kirn learns, were based on books and movies? What are the hidden psychological links between the artist and the con man? To answer these and other questions, Kirn attends his old friend's murder trial and uses it as an occasion to reflect on both their tangled personal relationship and the surprising literary sources of Rockefeller's evil. This investigation of the past climaxes in a tense jailhouse reunion with a man whom Kirn realizes he barely knew--a predatory, sophisticated genius whose life, in some respects, parallels his own and who may have intended to take another victim during his years as a fugitive from justice: Kirn himself. Combining confessional memoir, true crime reporting, and cultural speculation, Blood Will Out is a Dreiser-esque tale of self-invention, upward mobility, and intellectual arrogance. It exposes the layers of longing and corruption, ambition, and self-delusion beneath the Great American con.

Blood Will Out

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Audible Studios on Brilliance Audio

Up in the Air

Hodder&Stoughton

Over the last century air travel has evolved from a high-risk experiment involving a few visionary pioneers to an efficientand often irritatingmeans for distributing masses of people to the far reaches of the globe. During the hundred-year history of human air travel, it has yielded writing that is, by turns, heroic, dreamy, subversive, and utterly dire. This anthology traces this trajectory from the early letters and memoirs of Wilbur and Orville Wright, and Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, to the diaries of Amelia Earhart. Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s heroism gives way to the darkly magical storytelling of Roald Dahl, and the spare, elegiac prose of master stylist James Salter. More recent stories by Erica Jong, Mary Gaitskill, Thomas Beller, Mike Albo, Maxine Swann, and David Sedaris examine an array of contemporary subjects, from the addictiveness of mile-high sex, to etiquette for cramped seating and accounts of racial profiling post9/11. Flight Patterns promises an entertaining refuge for frequent fliers, and a gateway to dreams for nighttime readers. These writings exude the primal fear and cool perspective that can only come from seeing the worldand one’s own lifefrom a great distance. Flight Patterns renders airplane travel a time capsule of modern life.

Flight Patterns: A Century of Stories about Flying

DAVID SEDARIS

MARY GAITSKILL

Roald, Dahl

James-Salter

alice-munro

tobias-wolff

Genre Fiction

Grove Press, Open City Books

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Books by Walter Kirn