Walter Kirn and Shawn Vestal are the next featured authors in this year’s Visiting Writers Series. This event will include a reading, Q&A and book signing at 7:00 p.m. in the Commandery Room at Riverside Place (formerly known as the Spokane Masonic Temple).
All readings are free and open to the public.
Walter Kirn the author of eight books, most recognized for Up in the Air, which was made into a movie starring George Clooney, and Blood Will Out, a memoir of his friendship with the imposter and convicted murderer, Clark Rockefeller. As a writer, he has published numerous short stories and novels. He has reviewed books for New York Magazine and has written for The New York Times Sunday Magazine, and is a contributing editor of Time, where he has gained popularity for his entertaining and humorous first-person articles. In 1983, he graduated from Princeton University with a B.A. in English. Following that, he has received a second undergraduate degree in English Literature from Oxford University. His teaching background includes time at the University of Montana and at the University of Chicago teaching nonfiction writing.
“A memoir in the guise of a ‘true crime story’—a double portrait of writer and subject in which the subject is partially erased even as the writer evokes the considerable tools of his imagination to reconstruct him and his own motive in the bizarre relationship.” -Joyce Carol Oates
Current column writer for The Spokesman-Review and teacher in the MFA program at Eastern Washington University, Shawn Vestal is an experienced writer with ties to the Spokane area. Vestal’s Godforsaken Idaho, a collection of short stories published by New Harvest in April 2013, was named the winner of the PEN/Robert W. Bingham prize, which honors a debut book that “represents distinguished literacy achievement and suggests great promise.” His stories have appeared in Tin House, McSweeney’s, Ecotone, The Southern-Review, Cutbank, Sou’wester, Florida Review and many other journals. Godforsaken Idaho, Shawn Vestal’s slam-dunk debut, casts a cinematic shadow on the American West. In “Winter Elders,” a Mormon missionary stalks a former church member to devastating effect. The doubters in these stories lose religion but find that “nothing that happens has to be real, and anything is possible.”-Kristy Davis
About the Books…Walter Kirn will be reading from his novel Blood Will Out, a story of the highly improbable friendship that develops between two men. According to W.W Norton & Company, Kirn’s unique story of being duped by a real-life con artist takes us on a “bizarre journey from the posh private clubrooms of Manhattan to the unforgivable courtrooms and prisons of Los Angeles. As Kirn discovers the truth about his friend, a psychopath masquerading as a gentleman, he also unfolds the hard truths about himself.” According to the Boston Globe, this novel makes the darkness visible. Shawn Vestal will be reviewing his debut book, “God Forsaken Idaho” a culmination of stories that explore the spiritual and physical topography of Idaho- specifically Mormonism, and specifically in Southern Idaho.
