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Walter Kirn

Bio: 
Walter Kirn is an essayist, critic, and novelist whose work appears regularly in The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and The New York Times Book Review. He is the author of five works of fiction, including My Hard Bargain: Stories, She Needed Me, Thumbsucker, Up in the Air, and Mission to America. He recently completed a screenplay based on his 2005 Atlantic article \"Lost in the Meritocracy\", a memoir of his years at Princeton. Kirn's work is represented in the anthology by his American Everyman, a provocative depiction of Warren Buffett as a great communicator in the tradition of Mark Twain and Will Rogers.

George McGovern was U.S. Senator for South Dakota from 1962 to 1980. He won the nomination as his party's candidate for the presidency against incumbent President Richard Nixon. Following his defeat by Nixon, he served for six years as president of the Middle East Policy Council. He is the author of a dozen books and numerous published articles. He is a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom-the nation's highest civilian award. Senator McGovern is represented in the anthology by his 1967 Atlantic essay, \"America's Crisis Addiction,\" in which he argued that the country's tendency to embark on military interventions of dubious relevance to the national interest had detracted resources and attention from its own social problems -- a thesis that seems every bit as timely today as it was forty years ago.

James Q. Wilson is the author or co-author of fifteen books, the most recent of which is The Marriage Problem. Others include Moral Judgement; The Moral Sense; American Government; Bureaucracy; and Thinking About Crime. He is currently chairman of the Board of Academic Advisers of the American Enterprise Institute. In 2003, President George W. Bush presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award. He is currently the Ronald Reagan Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University.

Robert Vare is the editor at large of The Atlantic Monthly. He is a former editor at The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times Magazine, where he edited the Pulitzer Prize-winning cover story \"Grady's Gift,\" in 1991. In 2004, he was the editor of Things Worth Fighting For, a post-humously published collection of writings by Michael Kelly, the former Atlantic editor-in-chief who was killed while covering the war in Iraq. A former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, he has taught nonfiction writing at Yale and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

Perfidia: A Novel

James Ellroy
In Conversation With author Walter Kirn
Tuesday, September 9, 2014
01:05:32
ALOUD
Listen:
Episode Summary

Ellroy, one of America’s greatest living crime writers, draws on the history of Los Angeles in his newest novel, Perfidia. Together with Kirn, author of a recent riveting take on a Los Angeles cold case, Ellroy uncovers a corrupt city under the shadow of Pearl Harbor, where the investigation of a hellish murder of a Japanese family throws together and rips apart four driven souls.

Participant(s) Bio

James Ellroy, a native of Los Angeles, is a master of noir crime fiction. Ellroy has up close and personal knowledge of the world of crime, his life shadowed by a gruesome event: the unsolved murder of his mother when he was a child. Nearly all of his writing is set in Los Angeles, in the rough, racist, pre-Miranda Los Angeles of the decade following the Second World War. He is the author of the L. A. Quartet novels: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L. A. Confidential, and White Jazz. He is also the author of the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy—American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood's a Rover. His memoir, My Dark Places, was named as Time magazine’s Best Book of The Year.

Walter Kirn is the author of bestselling Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade, as well as Thumbsucker and Up in the Air, both made into major films. His work has appeared in GQ, New York, Esquire, and the New York Times Magazine.

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

Walter Kirn
In Conversation With Author Richard Rayner
Thursday, April 10, 2014
01:13:58
ALOUD
Listen:
Episode Summary

In the summer of 1998, 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. In this true and chilling story of a writer being duped by a real-life Mr. Ripley, Kirn invites us into the fun-house world of an eccentric son of privilege who would one day be unmasked as a serial impostor and a brutal double-murderer.

Participant(s) Bio

Walter Kirn is the author of Thumbsucker and Up in the Air, both made into major films. His work has appeared in GQ, New York, Esquire, and the New York Times Magazine.

Richard Rayner is the author of ten books, both fiction and non-fiction, including Los Angeles Without a Map (filmed from his own script with David Tennant, Vinissa Shaw, Johnny Depp, and Julie Delpy), The Blue Suit, Murder Book, and, most recently A Bright and Guilty Place, optioned for film by Christopher Nolan. He writes for the Los Angeles Review of Books, the LA Times, the New Yorker , and other publications as well as for TV and film. He teaches at USC.

The American Idea

Co-presented with The Atlantic Monthly
Thursday, October 18, 2007
01:14:25
ALOUD
Listen:
Episode Summary
For 150 years, The Atlantic Monthly has explored what its founders-including Emerson, Longfellow and Holmes-called \"The American Idea.\" Join us for a high-spirited discussion with celebrated Atlantic contributors about the role literary masters have played in interpreting and often rebuking American society and culture.
Participant(s) Bio
Walter Kirn is an essayist, critic, and novelist whose work appears regularly in The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and The New York Times Book Review. He is the author of five works of fiction, including My Hard Bargain: Stories, She Needed Me, Thumbsucker, Up in the Air, and Mission to America. He recently completed a screenplay based on his 2005 Atlantic article "Lost in the Meritocracy", a memoir of his years at Princeton. Kirn's work is represented in the anthology by his American Everyman, a provocative depiction of Warren Buffett as a great communicator in the tradition of Mark Twain and Will Rogers.

George McGovern was U.S. Senator for South Dakota from 1962 to 1980. He won the nomination as his party's candidate for the presidency against incumbent President Richard Nixon. Following his defeat by Nixon, he served for six years as president of the Middle East Policy Council. He is the author of a dozen books and numerous published articles. He is a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom-the nation's highest civilian award. Senator McGovern is represented in the anthology by his 1967 Atlantic essay, "America's Crisis Addiction," in which he argued that the country's tendency to embark on military interventions of dubious relevance to the national interest had detracted resources and attention from its own social problems -- a thesis that seems every bit as timely today as it was forty years ago.

James Q. Wilson is the author or co-author of fifteen books, the most recent of which is The Marriage Problem. Others include Moral Judgement; The Moral Sense; American Government; Bureaucracy; and Thinking About Crime. He is currently chairman of the Board of Academic Advisers of the American Enterprise Institute. In 2003, President George W. Bush presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award. He is currently the Ronald Reagan Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University.

Robert Vare is the editor at large of The Atlantic Monthly. He is a former editor at The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times Magazine, where he edited the Pulitzer Prize-winning cover story "Grady's Gift," in 1991. In 2004, he was the editor of Things Worth Fighting For, a post-humously published collection of writings by Michael Kelly, the former Atlantic editor-in-chief who was killed while covering the war in Iraq. A former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, he has taught nonfiction writing at Yale and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

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