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David Samuels is a Contributing Editor at Harper’s and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. He is known for writing long nonfiction narratives about con-men and fugitives, radicals, rap stars, addicts, thieves and politicians that explore the twinned American traditions of self-invention and self-deceit. His books Only Love Can Break Your Heart and The Runner were published in April, 2008 and released in paperback the following year. In a long review essay in The Nation, the critic John Palattella called David’s achievement “staggering” and compared his work favorably to that of Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe: “Like Didion, Samuels investigates the vortex of American life, a feeling of weightlessness and existential drift that can swallow people whole, but he reports on it in an entirely different manner.”