Bingham’s job is “to make limbo tolerable.” Bingham is a career transition counselor, “which is a fancy term for coaching people to understand job loss as an opportunity for personal and spiritual growth.” “Careers nowadays aren’t ladders, they’re lattices,” he tells a just-fired man. Kirn’s new novel, Up in the Air, features Ryan Bingham, a young management consultant who is days away from becoming a “mileage millionaire.” He is intent on racking up the remaining frequent flyer miles before his boss returns from a fishing trip and finds his letter of resignation. In that collection of stories, and in She Needed Me and Thumbsucker, the novels that followed, he set benchmarks for precision of expression, for selectivity, humor, and spot-on social exegesis. Up, Bustle and Out's Master Sessions 1, Calle 23, Havanaby Christopher Nicolsonĭuring a panel discussion on The Novel some years ago, Allan Gurganus eloquently brought the talk about Big Ideas around to LANGUAGE, saying, memorably, “There are those of us who are still loyal at the level of the sentence.” There aren’t many writers who exhibit that loyalty and take on the largest concerns with as much success as Walter Kirn, who has been winning the allegiance of smart readers since 1990 with the publication of My Hard Bargain. Terry Winters, The Anti-Collaboration: A Painter and an Architectby Carlos Brillembourg Jacqueline Humphries: New Paintingsby David Hunt Haruki Murakami's Sputnik Sweetheartby William Cohen Heather McGowan's Schoolingby Frances Richard Miguel León-Portilla and Earl Shorris's In the Language of Kingsby Daniel Flores y AscencioĪdam Phillips' Promises, Promisesby Fionn Meade

Tran Anh Hung's The Vertical Ray of the Sunby Lawrence Chua Glenn O'Brien's Downtown 81by David Krasnow The Frogs's Hopscotch Lollipop Sunday Surpriseby Lynn Geller & Nic Ratner Our Lady of the Assassinsby Fernando Vallejo

Up in the Air by Walter Kirn