Walter Kirn

Describes the author's fifteen-year relationship with eccentric New Yorker Clark Rockefeller, his discovery that Rockefeller was a serial imposter and murderer, and how his old friend's murder trial made him face hard truths about himself.

Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade

A traveling consultant for a Denver-based management firm, thirty-five-year-old Ryan Bingham spends his life on airplanes and in airports as he travels around the country, pursuing his goal to accumulate one million miles in his frequent flyer account. Reprint. 40,000 first printing.

Up in the Air

the undereducation of an overachiever

Lost in the meritocracy

A boy wracked with a serious oral fixation tries everything to break the cycle--sex, substance abuse, fly fishing, work, and religion--but nothing seems to work. Original. Tour.

A Novel

Thumbsucker

Up in the Air (Movie Tie-in Edition) (Random House Movie Tie-In Books)

The Unbinding

A traveling management consultant, thirty-five-year-old Ryan Bingham spends his life on airplanes and in airports as he travels around the country, pursuing his goal to accumulate one million miles in his frequent flyer account.

Chronicles a long, strange trip through America's ivy-covered temples of higher learning where standardized tests, class rankings and gamesmanship stand in the way of true intellectual fulfillment, and reveals the psychic costs of our advance-or-else educational system.

The Undereducation of an Overachiever

Lost in the Meritocracy

My Mother's Bible

The Stones, the Crows, the Grass, the Moon

Walter Kirn "should be sentenced to a lifetime writing fiction," proclaimed The New York Times Book Review about his short story collection, My Hard Bargain. The Christian Science-Monitor praised his "engaging blend of deadpan humor and genuine empathy"; "Thankfully," said The Philadelphia Inquirer, "Kirn never abandons his theme of uncertainty when observing modern angst." Now Walter Kirn has fashioned She Needed Me, a moving, surprising, and darkly comic novel whose sympathetic portrait of a disillusioned generation is mercifully uncynical. Weaver Walquist and Kim Lindgren first meet outside a St. Paul, Minnesota, abortion clinic. Kim - twenty-three, pregnant, with no money to finish junior college - is about to walk inside. Weaver is lying in front of the door. At twenty-six, he is a Bible-carrying member of the Conscience Squad, a fanatical right-wing protest group...yet readers of all minds will be drawn to this gentle, questing soul as he struggles with his feelings for Kim and his subsequent sexual desire for her; his crumbling devotion to the church; and his waning loyalty to his employer, Sanipure, a Christian soap and cosmetics company that calls sales "fellowship moments." But Weaver was not always devout. The only child of a widowed, highly successful Wisconsin liquor store owner, he tried to ward off teenage isolation with a mixture of pot and pills, vodka, sex and heavy metal music, until born-again Christian Lucas Boone found him half dead on the floor of a Greyhound station men's room. As Weaver tries to persuade Kim to have her baby, they embark upon a journey that brings them into contact with a cast of keenly drawn characters: Chuck and Dixie Lindgren, Kim's parents, who made more money in one hot Las Vegas weekend than they ever earned from their North Dakota farm; charismatic, paranoid Lucas Boone, popping anti-depressant pills like candy; Kim's disaffected brother, Ricky, who makes a modest living burglarizing his relatives' homes; and finally sharp-tongued Margaret Walquist, whom Weaver always thinks of as "my mother the businesswoman." A funny, bittersweet chronicle of young people falling in love and searching for answers in a crazy, changing world, She Needed Me is vibrant and honest without being judgmental. Walter Kirn, whose stories evoked "the feeling...that life's simple, and that it's also too complex to even begin to understand" (Rick Bass, The Dallas Morning News) has triumphed again with a novel that aims for the human heart - and strikes its mark.

She Needed Me

My Hard Bargain was hailed as an impressive debut by The Wall Street Journal, and substantial and down to earth by the New Yorker. The exalted, memorable characters in Kirn's acclaimed debut short story col lection confront the real hard bargains in life that spring up from the business of simply living, and Kirn transforms these hard-luck stories into strapping moral lessons which evoke the bonds that unite us all.

Stories

My Hard Bargain

In the summer of 1998, Walter Kirn - then a young novelist struggling with fatherhood and a dissolving marriage - set out on a peculiar, fateful errand: to personally deliver a crippled hunting dog from an animal shelter in Montana to the New York apartment of one Clark Rockefeller, a secretive young banker and art collector. Thus began a fifteen-year relationship that drew Kirn deep into the fun-house world of an outlandish, eccentric son of privilege who, one day, would be shockingly unmasked as a brazen serial impostor and brutal double-murderer. This is a one-of-a-kind story of an innocent man duped by a real-life Mr Ripley, taking us on a bizarre and haunting journey from the private club rooms of Manhattan to the courtrooms and prisons of Los Angeles.

Blood Will Out

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

On a mission to recruit young women for their church, Mason LaVerle and Elias Stark leave Montana and experience the excesses of contemporary American society in a Colorado ski town along with its colorful inhabitants.

Mission to America

Depuis des années, Ryan Bingham ne touche plus terre : son boulot - il se charge d'organiser des licenciements - le conduit d'entreprise en entreprise, de chambre d'hôtel en chambre d'hôtel, d'aéroport en aéroport. Il ne supporte plus son métier, n'a plus de maison, plus d'épouse, plus d'attache familiale, et ne se sent chez lui que dans le cocon d'une cabine pressurisée, face au sourire d'une hôtesse de l'air ou à un plateau-repas mal réchauffé. Son but dans la vie : accumuler un million de miles sur sa carte de fidélité d'une compagnie aérienne. Il y est presque, mais des turbulences pointent à l'horizon... D'une plume décapante qui dénonce avec talent et humour l'inhumanité croissante du monde du travail, Walter Kirn décrit l'implacable descente aux enfers d'un homme qui a la tête dans les nuages.

In the air

Novela en la que se basa la película del mismo título. Del director de Juno y Gracias por fumar. «Para conocerme tienes que volar conmigo. Siéntate. Yo, en el pasillo. Tú, atrapado por la ventanilla. Para ti yo soy un estereotipo, un charlatán». Ryan Bingham trabaja como Asesor de Transición Laboral, ayuda a la gente que ha perdido su empleo a entenderlo como una oportunidad para el crecimiento personal y espiritual; es decir, él es una mano ejecutora de recortes de plantilla. Este empleo le ha mantenido viajando durante años de aeropuerto en aeropuerto, hasta el punto de que le encanta el estilo de vida que lleva en «Mundo Aéreo», como él lo llama, un lugar fuera de lo terrenal donde las turbulencias afianzan los vínculos humanos. Pero Ryan no tiene relaciones personales, y tampoco un hogar permanente fuera de su mundo. Tras haber dejado su carta de renuncia en la mesa de su jefe, la única y última meta de Bingham parece ser conseguir un millón de millas como viajero habitual. Un viajero habitual con la cabeza en las nubes y una maleta llena de carencias.

Up in the air (En el aire)

Henning Ahrens

Der Motivationstrainer Ryan Bingham hat einen ausgeprägten Spleen: er sammelt Flugbonusmeilen. Sein ganzes privates wie berufliches Leben richtet sich nach Flugkilometern und deren Maximierung. Ob es um die Hochzeit seiner Schwester oder den Konkurs eines Klienten geht, Priorität hat immer der Fluguplan. Unermüdlich hetzt Ryan von Gate zu Gate, bald ist es soweit, die Millionen-Meilen-Grenze rückt in greifbare Nähe. Doch plötzlich gerät sein so sorgsam ausgetüfeltes Meilen-Jagen ins Wanken. Seine Kreditkarte wird aus unerfindlichen Gründen gesperrt, ein Hacker bedient sich seines Meilenkontos, in der Liebe läuft alles quer, seine Schwester verschwindet und auch seine Firma hat kein weiteres Interesse an ihm.

(Mr. Bingham sammelt Meilen)

Depuis des années Ryan Bingham ne touche plus terre : son boulot de consultant en management ? il est chargé d'organiser des licenciements ? le conduit d'entreprise en entreprise, de ville en ville, d'avion en aéroport, de chambre d'hôtel en chambre d'hôtel. Il n'a plus de maison, plus d'épouse, plus d'attaches familiales : il ne se sent chez lui que dans le cocon d'une cabine pressurisée, face au sourire d'une hôtesse de l'air ou à un plateau-repas mal réchauffé. Son but dans la vie ? Accumuler un million de miles du programme de fidélité d'une compagnie aérienne. Il y est presque, mais brûle d'envie de démissionner...D'une plume décapante qui excelle à dénoncer l'inhumanité croissante du monde du travail et ses effets délétères, Walter Kirn décrit avec le talent d'un Don DeLillo l'implacable descente aux enfers d'un homme qui a la tête dans les nuages. Un roman culte et incontournable aux Etats-Unis.

Walter Kirn

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