Walter Kirn

"Kent Selkirk is an operator at AidSat, an omnipresent subscriber service ready to answer, solve, and assist with the client's every problem. Through the AidSat network Kent has a wealth of information at his fingertips - information he can use to monitor subscribers' vital signs, information he can use to track their locations, information he can use to insinuate himself into their very lives."--Jacket.

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.

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.

"This eighties-centric, Ritalin-fueled, comic novel by a writer to watch brings energy and originality to the classic Midwestern coming-of-age story."--BOOK JACKET. "Meet Justin Cobb, "the King Kong of oral obsessives" (as his dentist dubs him) and the most appealingly bright and screwed-up fictional adolescent since Holden Caulfield donned his hunter's cap. For years, no remedy - not orthodontia, not the escalating threats of his father, Mike, a washed-out linebacker turned sporting goods entrepreneur, not the noxious cayenne pepper-based Suk-No-Mor - can cure Justin's thumbsucking habit. Then a course of hypnosis seemingly does the trick, but true to the conservatism of neurotic energy, the problem doesn't so much disappear as relocate. Sex, substance abuse, speech team, flyfishing, honest work, even Mormonism - Justin throws himself into each pursuit with a hyperactive energy that even his daily Ritalin dose does little to blunt. Each time, however, he discovers that there is no escaping the unruly imperatives of his self and the confines of his deeply eccentric family. The only "cure" for the adolescent condition is time and distance."--BOOK JACKET.

Percentile is destiny in America."So says Walter Kirn, a peerless observer and interpreter of American life, in this whip-smart memoir of his own long strange trip through American education. Working his way up the ladder of standardized tests, extracurricular activities, and class rankings, Kirn launched himself eastward from his rural Minnesota hometown to the ivy-covered campus of Princeton University. There he found himself not in a temple of higher learning so much as an arena for gamesmanship, snobbery, social climbing, ass-kissing, and recreational drug use, where the point of literature classes was to mirror the instructor's critical theories and actual reading of the books under consideration was optional. Just on the other side of the "bell curve's leading edge" loomed a complete psychic collapse.LOST IN THE MERITOCRACY reckons up the costs of a system where the point is simply to keep accumulating points and never to look back--or within. It's a remarkable book that suggests the first step toward intellectual fulfillment is getting off the treadmill that is the American meritocracy. Every American who has spent years of his or her life there will experience many shocks of recognition while reading Walter Kirn's sharp, rueful, and often funny book--and likely a sense of liberation at its end.