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.

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.

Mason LaVerle is a young man on a mission–a mission to save his people’s way of life. Mason was raised in a tiny, isolated Montanan sect, the church of the Aboriginal Fulfilled Apostles. But the Apostles face a dwindling membership, so Mason is sent on an outreach operation to bring back converts–specifically brides. As he discovers shopping malls, fast food, and faster women, the forces of faith and the forces of America collide, leading Mason to the brink of missionary madness.

A real-life Talented Mr. Ripley, the unbelievable thirty-year run of a shape-shifting con man. The story of Clark Rockefeller is a stranger-than-fiction twist on the classic American success story of the self-made man-because Clark Rockefeller was totally made up. The career con man who convincingly passed himself off as Rockefeller was born in a small village in Germany. At seventeen, obsessed with getting to America, he flew into the country on dubious student visa documents and his journey of deception began. Over the next thirty years, boldly assuming a series of false identities, he moved up the social ladder through exclusive enclaves on both coasts-culminating in a stunning twelve-year marriage to a rising star businesswoman with a Harvard MBA who believed she'd wed a Rockefeller. The imposter charmed his way into exclusive clubs and financial institutions-working on Wall Street, showing off an extraordinary art collection-until his marriage ended and he was arrested for kidnapping his daughter, which exposed his past of astounding deceptions as well as a connection to the bizarre disappearance of a California couple in the mid-1980s. The story of The Man in the Rockefeller Suit is a probing and cinematic exploration of an audacious imposer-and a man determined to live the American dream by any means necessary.

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.

A New York Times Notable Book A Daily Beast Best Book of the Year A Huffington Post Best Book of the Year From elementary school on, Walter Kirn knew how to stay at the top of his class: He clapped erasers, memorized answer keys, and parroted his teachers’ pet theories. But when he launched himself eastward to an Ivy League university, Kirn discovered that the temple of higher learning he had expected was instead just another arena for more gamesmanship, snobbery, and social climbing. In this whip-smart memoir of kissing-up, cramming, and competition, Lost in the Meritocracy reckons the costs of an educational system where the point is simply to keep accumulating points and never to look back—or within.

Kate Jasper, Marin County, California’s own organically grown amateur sleuth, returns in this tenth mystery in the series. Kate Jasper is feeling “karmically impaired” in Murder on the Astral Plane. In her view, she carries an astral virus to any group she joins, always leaving someone just plain dead. Kate’s best friend, Barbara Chu, says Kate’s simply thinking negatively. Barbara practices a little metaphysical shock therapy by tricking Kate into participating in an unannounced psychic soiree. And sure as shooting stars, by the end of a blindfolded intuition exercise, Silk Sokoloff, author and columnist of “Erotica, Et Cetera,” has been fatally garrotted by a wire cat toy. Kate figures one of the clairvoyants, intuitives, or telepaths in the group should be able to figure out whodunit. But their collective psychic vision is not anywhere near twenty-twenty. Now Kate needs her own crystal ball if she wants to die of old age rather than New Age.