In the first collection of Lake Wobegon monologues, Keillor tells readers more about some of the people from Lake Wobegon Days and introduces some new faces.
In the spring of 1926, the Soderbjerg brothers, Ray and Roy, plunge into radio and launch station WLT (With Lettuce and Tomato) to rescuer their failing restaurant and become the Sandwich Kings of South Minneapolis. For the next quarter century, the “Friendly Neighbor” station produces a dazzling array of shows and stars, including Leo LaValley, Dad Benson, Wingo Beals, Slim Graves and Little Buddy, chain-smoking child star Marjery Moore, and blind baseball announcer Buck Steller. Francis With, a shy young man from North Dakota, entranced by radio, gets into WLT through his uncle Art and quickly becomes the Soderbjerg's right hand. Soon Francis is a budding announcer adored by Lily Dale, the crippled nightingale of WLT kept hidden from her fans, whose firing contributes to the downfall of the station. And then comes television.
“Lake Wobegon Days is about the way our beliefs, desires and fears tail off into abstractions--and get renewed from time to time. . . this book, unfolding Mr. Keillor's full design, is a genuine work of American history.” —The New York Times “A comic anatomy of what is small and ordinary and therefore potentially profound and universal in American life…Keillor’s strength as a writer is to make the ordinary extraordinary.” —Chicago Tribune “Keillor’s laughs come dear, not cheap, emerging from shared virtue and good character, from reassuring us of our neighborliness and strength….His true subject is how daily life is shot with grace. Keillor writes a prose that can be turned to laughter, to tears…to compassion or satire, to a hundred effects. He is a brilliant parodist.” —San Francisco Chronicle
Stories, essays, poems, and personal reminiscences from the sage of Lake Wobegon When, at thirteen, he caught on as a sportswriter for the Anoka Herald, Garrison Keillor set out to become a professional writer, and so he has done—a storyteller, sometime comedian, essayist, newspaper columnist, screenwriter, poet. Now a single volume brings together the full range of his work: monologues from A Prairie Home Companion, stories from The New Yorker and The Atlantic, excerpts from novels, newspaper columns. With an extensive introduction and headnotes, photographs, and memorabilia, The Keillor Reader also presents pieces never before published, including the essays “Cheerfulness” and “What We Have Learned So Far.” Keillor is the founder and host of A Prairie Home Companion, celebrating its fortieth anniversary in 2014. He is the author of nineteen books of fiction and humor, the editor of the Good Poems collections, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
“Keillor’s best stuff is clean (in the sense that lines are clean), down to earth, exquisitely good-hearted, highly ludicrous, and as labored as nitrous oxide…. This book will either leave you dumbfounded or happy—almost deservedly happy—to be anywhere” —The New York Times Book Review “His humor is cerebral and complex, a blend of romance and nostalgia; it sparklingly parodies the American (and human) condition…. His stories and satires glow with a sense of time and place.” —The Washington Post
In this thoughtful, deeply personal work, one of the nation's best-loved voices takes the plunge into politics and comes up with a book that has had all of America talking. Here, with great heart, supple wit, and a dash of anger, Garrison Keillor describes the simple democratic values-the Golden Rule, the obligation to defend the weak against the powerful, and others- that define his hard-working Midwestern neighbors and that today's Republicans seem determined to subvert. A reminiscence, a political tract, and a humorous meditation, Homegrown Democrat is an entertaining, refreshing addition to today's rancorous political debate. * A New York Times bestseller * Updated and revised with a new introduction for the 2006 midterm elections * A Featured Alternate Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club
With the warmth and humor we've come to know, the creator and host of A Prairie Home Companion shares his own remarkable story. In That Time of Year, Garrison Keillor looks back on his life and recounts how a Brethren boy with writerly ambitions grew up in a small town on the Mississippi in the 1950s and, seeing three good friends die young, turned to comedy and radio. Through a series of unreasonable lucky breaks, he founded A Prairie Home Companion and put himself in line for a good life, including mistakes, regrets, and a few medical adventures. PHC lasted forty-two years, 1,557 shows, and enjoyed the freedom to do as it pleased for three or four million listeners every Saturday at 5 p.m. Central. He got to sing with Emmylou Harris and Renée Fleming and once sang two songs to the U.S. Supreme Court. He played a private eye and a cowboy, gave the news from his hometown, Lake Wobegon, and met Somali cabdrivers who’d learned English from listening to the show. He wrote bestselling novels, won a Grammy and a National Humanities Medal, and made a movie with Robert Altman with an alarming amount of improvisation. He says, “I was unemployable and managed to invent work for myself that I loved all my life, and on top of that I married well. That’s the secret, work and love. And I chose the right ancestors, impoverished Scots and Yorkshire farmers, good workers. I’m heading for eighty, and I still get up to write before dawn every day.”
“Garrison Keillor made it possible, after twenty years of black humor…to be both funny and nice, hip and winsome, scathing and loving, all in the flick of a single many-barbed quip——The Washington Post Book World “Keillor’s literary style is as flexible and assured as his vocal delivery. It can slip from mood to mood so subtly and quickly you’re never quite sure where you are…. [His] writing has the silvery slip of running water, so graceful and easy it’s hard to believe it can carry so much that is jagged and unresolved. His integrity lies in his not smoothing away those rough edges in the swift current of his prose; they’re bruisingly, sometimes cuttingly there.” —The Village Voice
Clint is one of the old reliables in Lake Wobegon - the treasurer of the Lutheran church and the auto mechanic who starts your car on below-zero mornings. For six years he has run the Fourth of July parade, turning what was once a line of pickup trucks and girls pushing baby carriages that hold their cats into a dazzling spectacle that has attracted the attention of CNN and prompted the governor to put in an appearance as well. The town is dizzy with anticipation. Until, that is, they hear of Clint's ambition to run for Congress. They're embarrassed for him. They know him too well - his unfortunate episodes involving vodka sours, his rocky marriage. And then there is his friendship, or whatever it is, with the twenty-four-year-old girl who dresses up as the Statue of Liberty for the parade. It's rumoured that underneath those robes she is buck naked, and that her torch contains a quart of booze. It's Lake Wobegon as it's always been - good, loving people who drive each other crazy.
John Tollefson, a son of Lake Wobegon, has moved East to manage a radio station at a college for academically challenged children of financially gifted parents in upstate New York. Having achieved this pleasant perch, John has a brilliant idea for a restaurant specializing in fresh sweet corn. And he falls in love with an historian named Alida Freeman, hard at work on a book about a nineteenth-century Norwegian naturopath, an acquaintance of Lincoln, Thoreau, Whitman, and Susan B. Anthony.
The screenplay of iconic radio host Garrison Keillor’s Robert Altman-directed major motion picture, A Prairie Home Companion, starring Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin. The day of reckoning has come to the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, home of A Prairie Home Companion. The show is closing, the theater is going dark. Station WLT has been sold to a broadcast conglomerate in Texas. The wrecking ball is poised to swing as the regulars—the Johnson Girls, Yolanda and Rhonda, and the singing cowboys, Dusty and Lefty, crooner Chuck Akers, and announcer Garrison Keillor—arrive for the last broadcast in a state of disbelief. But when the Dangerous Woman appears with her Botticellian hair and dazzling white trench coat, the final curtain catches them all by surprise. • Features a foreword by director Robert Altman and an introduction by Garrison Keillor • Contains an eight-page insert of photos from the movie set
Garrison Keillor makes his long- awaited return to Lake Wobegon with this New York Times bestseller The first new Lake Wobegon novel in seven years is a cause for celebration. And Pontoon is nothing less than a spectacular return to form-replete with a bowling ball-urn, a hot-air balloon, giant duck decoys, a flying Elvis, and, most importantly, Wally's pontoon boat. As the wedding of the decade approaches (accompanied by wheels of imported cheese and giant shrimp shish kebabs), the good-loving people of Lake Wobegon do what they do best: drive each other slightly crazy.
Having transformed the annual Fourth of July parade into a Lake Wobegon extravaganza, steadfast mechanic Clint Bunsen attracts the attention of the governor and the media before announcing his intention to run for Congress.
Leaving his wife to pursue an idealized life as a writer, Larry Wyler finds his early successes quickly deteriorating and returns home to write for an advice column, through which he learns unexpected life lessons.
The wonderfully comic, marvellously surreal story of WLT, the extraordinary 'Friendly Neighbor' radio station . . . 'After a few pages, you may easily be reduced to a state of contented giggling, which forces you to walk around smiling inanenly at people.' Independent 'It's a brilliant book . . . A paragraph from Keillor has more sparks than the average author manages in an entire novel . . . In short, Radio Romance confirms Keillor's place as the funniest fiction writer in America.' Time Out
Lake Wobegon goes to Italy in Garrison Keillor's latest Twelve Wobegonians fly to Rome to decorate a war hero's grave, led by Marjorie Krebsbach, with radio host Gary Keillor along for the ride. The pilgrimage is inspired by a phone call from an Italian woman seeking her Lake Wobegon roots and by a memoir O Paradiso by a farm wife who found the secret of life and love in Italy. And by marjorie's longing to win back the love of her husband Carl. Far from home, sitting in the rain in the Piazza Navona, the pilgrims talks about themselves, as they never could do in the Chatterbox Café. "You're not going to write about this, I hope," says Irene Bunsen. "Of course I am. I invented this town," says Mr. Keillor. "Oh my, aren't you something," she replies.
Barokke og meget menneskelige historier om dagligdagens sorger og glæder blandt tyske og skandinaviske indvandrere i en lille by i Minnesota på kanten af den store prærie
Guys are in trouble these days," says Garrison Keillor. "Years ago, manhood was an opportunity for achievement and now it's just a problem to be overcome. Guys who once might have painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling are now just trying to be Mr. O.K. All-Rite, the man who can bake a cherry pie, be passionate in a skillful way, and yet also lift them bales and tote that barge." This brilliant collection confirms Keillor’s reputation as an ingenious storyteller and a very funny guy.
Wallace P. Flynn loves smelly cheeses so much that his family leaves him, his dog and cats can't stand to be around him, and even the skunks have to move.
I don't know much about Lutherans and that is one reason I've told stories about them over the years, so I could learn.---From the Introduction Based on Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon monologues, Life among the Lutherans is a collection of stories about the struggles of ordinary people in an imperfect world, the life and work of the pastor who leads them, and the church to whose high standards they aspire in the small town they call home. The stories in Life among the Lutherans reflect everything Keillor fans have come to expect of this master storyteller. Some are familiar, including the quintessentially Lutheran "95 Theses" from Lake Wobegon Days, others are new. Laugh out loud about the church directory filled with photos that are just plain awful. Share the moment when Pastor Ingqvist receives a leather-bound copy of his sermons. Keillor's command of every little detail of life in Lake Wobegon is bound to entertain, surprise, and make readers---even those who aren't Lutheran---feel right at home in the mythical community where "all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.
Garrison Keillor reads (or sings) all the poems in the book on two CDs inside, with music by Rich Dworsky 'When I was 16, Helen Fleischman assigned me to memorise Shakespeare's Sonnet No. 29, "When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state" for English class, and fifty years later, that poem is still in my head. Algebra got washed away, and geometry and most of biology, but those lines about the redemptive power of love in the face of shame are still here behind my eyeballs, more permanent than my own teeth. The sonnet is a durable good. These 77 of mine include sonnets of praise, some erotic, some lamentations, some street sonnets and a 12-sonnet cycle of months. If anything here offends, I beg your pardon, I come in peace, I depart in gratitude' - Garrison Keillor
The first children's novel by the author of Lake Wobegon Days. Twelve-year-old Rachel's parents have always been a little eccentric, but might their weirdness be rubbing off on her? Is she becoming the town nerd? And what lies ahead during the long, lonely summer in Sandy Bottom?
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