Collections
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.
"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.
Five sweet stories about three generations of the Krebsbach family.
The latest in a line of bestselling collections that began with News from Lake Wobegon, this set selects monologues from four years (1999-2002) of live radio programs. Some were broadcast from the Fitzgerald Theatre, the show's St. Paul home. Others were recorded on the road in Dublin, Pasadena, Grand Forks, and other exotic places.
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.
'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 stateA" 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.
Famous radio private eye Guy Noir leaps from A Prairie Home Companion to the page On the 12th floor of the Acme Building, on a cold February day in St. Paul, Guy Noir looks down the barrel of a loaded revolver in the hands of geezer gangster Joey Roast Beef who is demanding to hear what lucrative scheme Guy is cooking up with stripper-turned-women's-studies-professor Naomi Fallopian. Everyone wants to know-Joey, Lieutenant McCafferty, reporter Gene Williker, Guy’s ex-girlfriend Sugar O'Toole, the despicable Larry B. Larry, the dreamboat Scarlett Anderson, Mr. Kress of the FDA–and Guy faces them one by one, as he and Naomi pursue a dream of earning gazillions by selling a surefire method of dramatic weight loss. In this whirlwind caper Guy faces danger, falls in love, and faces off with the capo del capo del grande primo capo Johnny Banana.
O What a Luxury: Verses Lyrical, Vulgar, Pathetic & Profound is the first poetry collection written by Garrison Keillor, the celebrated radio host of A Prairie Home Companion . Although he has edited several anthologies of his favorite poems, this volume forges a new path for him, as a poet of light verse. He writeswith his characteristic combination of humor and insighton love, modernity, nostalgia, politics, religion, and other facets of daily life. Keillor’s verses are charming and playful, locating sublime song within the humdrum of being human.
Edward Lear made the form popular for children, and Anon wrote the great dirty limericks, and Garrison Keillor does both while pushing the limerick envelope. E.g. Here is a yawp for old Walt Whitman, who’s well worth his salt Though sometimes he’ll slip And just let her rip And say: “Camerados! What is this blade of grass? Who am I? Who are you?” And you have to say HALT. Of course he deals in the vulgar. And the semi-salacious: Chopin wrote a lovely etude That, when performed in the nude By a mademoiselle Who plays fairly well Can certainly uplift the mood. Many are educational, including his 26-limerick abecedary for English majors. And also: The Confederate general Bob E. Lee Committed treason quite freely And General Grant Beat him up cause you can’t Attack federal troops…I mean really. He’s written limericks in honor of friends, members of the New York Philharmonic, his daughter’s teachers, a quintuple for Emily Dickinson, and one for his ophthalmologist. My eye surgeon, good Dr. Khanna, Looked through her eyepiece down on a Novelist’s retina Who thought he was gettin’ a Vision of the blessed Madonna. Woven through the verses are terse reflections on daily life, work, faith, and the old man of St. Paul whose office was a toilet stall.
Radio personality and author Garrison Keillor delights and astounds in this hybrid memoir/poetry collection that combines anecdotes from his childhood and his "A Prairie Home Companion" years with literary limericks, darkly humorous limericks, extended limericks (aka limericks with porches), and so much more. Limericks are the poems that can be written in the empty spaces between life, Keillor posits, and this compact book illustrates the full range of the form's utility: thank-you notes to doctors, odes to "Prairie Home" performers, postcard greetings from exotic places, succinct biographies of favorite writers, and scribbles in the margins of Sunday church programs. Readers who have always pined for the perfect limerick hinging on the place name "Schenectady" will at long last be placated. Meanwhile, longtime Keillor fans will gain insight into a whole new side of the bestselling author, whose obsession with limericks goes all the way back to when the bespectacled, lanky youth wearing hand-me-down jeans (from his sister) recited to his Anoka High School class: There was a young man of Anoka Who tried to write a great limerick. He tried and he tried And some were not bad, But something seemed to be missing.