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.From the Trade Paperback edition.

This eighties-centric, Ritalin-fueled, pitch-perfect comic novel by a writer to watch brings energy and originality to the classic Midwestern coming-of-age story.Meet Justin Cobb, "the King Kong of oral obsessives" (as his dentist dubs him) and the most appealingly bright and screwed-up fictional adolescent since Holden Caulfield donned his hunter's cap. For years, no remedy--not orthodontia, not the escalating threats of his father, Mike, a washed-out linebacker turned sporting goods entrepreneur, not the noxious cayenne pepper-based Suk-No-Mor--can cure Justin's thumbsucking habit.Then a course of hypnosis seemingly does the trick, but true to the conservation of neurotic energy, the problem doesn't so much disappear as relocate. Sex, substance abuse, speech team, fly-fishing, honest work, even Mormonism--Justin throws himself into each pursuit with a hyperactive energy that even his daily Ritalin dose does little to blunt.Each time, however, he discovers that there is no...

An In Cold Blood for our time, a chilling, compulsive story of a writer unwittingly caught in the wake of a grifter-turned-murderer. 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. Kirn's one-of-a-kind story, already excerpted in The New Yorker, of being duped by a real-life Mr. Ripley, takes us on a bizarre and haunting journey from the posh private club rooms of Manhattan to the hard-boiled courtrooms and prisons of Los Angeles. In Blood Will Out, Kirn lays bare a Dreiseresque tale of class, self-invention, and the great American con.