Reading: Blood Will Out by Walter Kirn

Livingston author Walter Kirn will give a free reading from his latest work of nonfiction, Blood Will Out, on Thursday, April 24.

“In the summer of 1998, Walter 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. Thus began a fifteen-year relationship that drew Kirn deep into the fun-house world of an outlandish, eccentric son of privilege who ultimately would be unmasked as a brazen serial impostor, child kidnapper, and brutal murderer.”

Blood Will Out, which is currently sitting on the New York Times bestseller list, has been called the “In Cold Blood of our time,” and was chosen by USA Today as one of the top 10 books of winter 2014.

Kirn is the author of eight books, many of which have been received to national acclaim. Two of his novels, Thumbsucker and Up in the Air, were made into major movies. (Up in the Air garnered six Oscar nominations, and earned Kirn and his family a trip to the Academy Awards). He sparred with Stephen Colbert on “The Colbert Report” over his 2009 memoir, Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overacheiver. His work has appeared in GQ, Esquire, New Republic, the New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker, where an excerpt of Blood Will Out first appeared.

Elk River Books, 120 N. Main St. (formerly Chatham Fine Art), will host a signing and reception following the 7 p.m. reading, which is free and open to the public.