What is a monster? What isn’t a monster? What happened to Rebekah Brooks? What happened to Walter Kirn’s G.Q. story? Why is Buzzfeed so great? Rhetorical questions you never wanted answered, answered. Here are your Tuesday evening Media Briefs. Read More
Robert Downey Jr. talks in long and overly enigmatic sentences using phrases like “transcending fear-based rituals” and “disempowered sense of magical thinking” when Walter Kirn sits down next to him on Venice Beach to interview him about his not-so-recent comeback–Iron Man 2 opens next weekend–for the May issue of Rolling Stone. (Not available online.)
So Read More
In the opening sequence of Fly Girls, a half-hour reality series premiering later this month on the CW, five Virgin America flight attendants are shown buttoning up white blouses, slipping on pencil skirts and tying ascots to the tune of Ke$ha’s “Tik Tok.” A coquettish voice-over begins: “We jet to the most beautiful places in Read More
Paramount Pictures still cares about Up in the Air author Walter Kirn and respects him as a person and wants to hang out and stuff. If he’s not doing anything they were thinking maybe he would like him to come to the Oscars with them:
“thanks to Paramount Pictures for coming through with Oscar tickets Read More
Although Walter Kirn’s novel Up in the Air was adapted into one of the year’s top Oscar contenders, Kirn received no tickets to the award ceremony. He has been reduced to tweeting his indignation.
“Caution to writers: Don’t expect that because you write a novel that becomes an Oscar-nominated film that you’ll Read More
Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever
by Walter Kirn
Doubleday, 211 pages, $24.95
If you were out to assemble the Platonic ideal, the parodic prototype, of the Great American bildungsroman—wherein a middle-class, top-of-his-class lad from the Middle West is saved, then savaged by the North Atlantic and, specifically, the Ivy League—how might Read More
The Montana writer Walter Kirn, guest-blogging on Andrew Sullivan’s site today, drops this in passing:
“I do have some insight into Hillary and it makes me dislike her. A couple of years ago I had an office over a clothing store in my small town and the woman in the office next door Read More
Up in the Air , by Walter Kirn. Doubleday, 303 pages, $23.95.
John Henry Days , by Colson Whitehead. Doubleday, 389 pages, $24.95.
Here’s a curious case of literary overlap: Walter Kirn’s new novel, Up in the Air , is about a man obsessed with amassing one million frequent-flyer miles. Meanwhile, in Colson Whitehead’s Read More
If the memorial tribute to William Gaddis held at the American Academy of Arts and Letters on May 6 was going to be anything like the writer’s books, it would have been long and somewhat daunting. Things didn’t turn out that way. The formal part of the service stretched but an hour and a quarter, Read More
