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...

GarrisonKeillor 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 sliterary 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...

Revisit the beguiling comic world of Lake Wobegon. In the first collection of Lake Wobegon monologues, Keillor tells readers ore about some of the people from Lake Wobegon Days and introduces some new faces. "Leaving Home is a book of exceptional charm . . . delightful . . . genuinely touching".--The Wall Street Journal. Available in early December.

"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...

"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

Garrison Keillor returns to Lake Wobegon in "a masterful portrait of the sort of small-town world that many of us Americans believe we grew up in, or would have liked to. . . . A wonderfully readable tale".--"The Washington Post Book World". NPR sponsorships.

Meet fourteen-year-old Gary. A self-described "tree-toad,"a sly and endearing geek, Gary has many unwieldy passions, chief among them his cousin Kate, his Underwood typewriter and the soft-porn masterpiece, High School Orgies. The folks of Lake Wobegon don't have much patience for a kid's ungodly obsessions, and so Gary manages to filter the hormonal earthquake that is puberty and his hopeless devotion to glamorous, rebellious Kate through his fantastic yarns. With every marvellous story he moves a few steps closer to becoming a writer. And when Kate gets herself into trouble with the...

America's beloved author, humorist, and storyteller offers a selection of meaningful and enjoyable poems
Every day people tune in to The Writer's Almanac on public radio and hear Garrison Keillor read them a poem. And here, for the first time, is an anthology of poems from the show, chosen by Keillor for their wit, their frankness, their passion, their -utter clarity in the face of everything else a person has to deal with at 7 a.m.-
Good Poems includes verse about lovers, children, failure, everyday life, death, and transcendance. It features the work of classic...

n this charming departure from Lake Wobegon, bestselling author Garrison Keillor tells a hilarious and heartwarming tale of ambition, success and failure, and the virtues of real love. Aspiring writer Larry Wyler leads a quiet, decent life with his do-gooder wife, Iris, in St. Paul, Minnesota, but he wants more. When his literary debut becomes a hit, he departs for a Manhattan apartment, a job at the New Yorker, and three- martini lunches with the great editor, William Shawn.

But when his second novel bombs and he finds himself in the grip of writer's block, Wyler discovers that...

Chosen by Garison Keillor for his readings on public radio's The Writer's Almanac, the 185 poems in this follow-up to his acclaimed anthology Good Poems are perfect for our troubled times.

Here, readers will find solace in works that are bracing and courageous, organized into such resonant headings as "Such As It Is More or Less" and "Let It Spill." From William Shakespeare and Walt Whitman to R. S. Gwynn and Jennifer Michael Hecht, the voices gathered in this collection will be more than welcome to those who've been struck by bad news, who are burdened by stress, or...