New Releases by Garrison Keillor

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.” The paperback edition has a new preface by the author.

With Boom Town, Garrison Keillor returns to his hometown of Lake Wobegon, which is in the midst of a rising economic tide driven by millennialentrepreneurs. "I go back home mainly for funerals, which these days are for people my age, 79, which gets my attention, an obituary with my number in it," he writes, as he sits at the bedside of Arlene Bunsen dying with humor and grace, and recalls a teenage love affair with Marlys Gunderson and observes the millennial culture, a stark contrast to the Lutheran farm town of the radio monologues. He spends the summer in the old Gunderson lake cabin, reliving the past, postponing his return to New York and his wife Giselle.Garrison Keillor wrote Boom Town during the pandemic lockdown in New York,reading drafts of it to his wife, Jenny, sitting across the room. He did parts of the book in monologues for audiences in Boston, New York, Washington, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Virginia, along with the story of how, in the 8th grade, his shop teacher Orville Buehler, worried about the boy''s carelessness with the power saw, sent him up to LaVona Person''s speech class, thus changing his life. Keillor says, "For many people, the key to success is discipline and education, but for me, it was ineptitude with power tools."

RULE 12 Don''t fight with younger people, even if you''re right, which you probably are. When they tell you outrageous things, say, "That''s very interesting, I''ll have to think about it." These people will be writing your obituary, and why give them a reason to put "contentious" or "embittered" in the second paragraph or accusations of cultural appropriation or insufficient anger at power imbalance. If you enjoy dispute, go after your elders if you still have any who are of sound mind. Poke them in the stomach. This will amaze them, seeing as everyone else pities them to death, and they will relish combat and rise to the challenge and it will improve their respiration. And a day later they''ll forget the whole thing.

Bestselling author and humorist Garrison Keillor returns to one of America''s most beloved mythical towns, beset by a contagion of alarming candor. A mysterious virus has infiltrated the good people of Lake Wobegon, transmitted via unpasteurized cheese made by a Norwegian bachelor farmer, the effect of which is episodic loss of social inhibition. Mayor Alice, Father Wilmer, Pastor Liz, the Bunsens and Krebsbachs, formerly taciturn elders, burst into political rants, inappropriate confessions, and rhapsodic proclamations, while their teenagers watch in amazement. Meanwhile, a wealthy outsider is buying up farmland for a Keep America Truckin’ motorway and amusement park, estimated to draw 2.2 million visitors a year. Clint Bunsen and Elena the hometown epidemiologist to the rescue, with a Fourth of July Living Flag and sweet corn feast for a finale. In his newest Lake Wobegon novel, Garrison Keillor takes us back to the small prairie town where for so long American readers and listeners have found laughter as well as the wry airing of our foibles and most familiar desires and fears—a town where, as we know, "all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average."

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.

In Lake Wobegon lives a good Lutheran lady who wishes for her ashes placed inside a bowling ball and dropped into the lake. Meanwhile, a wedding between a veterinary aromatherapist and her boyfriend Brent is set to take place aboard a pontoon boat. A delegation of renegade Lutheran pastors from Denmark has come to town, and there''s Raoul of the cigars and tinted shades, come to visit his elderly lover. All is in readiness for the wedding - the French champagne, the flying Elvis, the giant duck decoys - and then something quite unexpected happens . . .

A wealthy and depressed Chicago man, bound for Christmas in Hawaii, is abruptly summoned home to North Dakota. He arrives just in time to be trapped there by a blizzard. During his stay, he reaches an epiphany worthy of the season and resolves to simplify his life.

Read with his trademark delivery, Garrison Keillor tells of the ups and downs of small-town life in Lake Wobegon at Christmas time.

¿Oh, baby, won¿t you dance with me? Little baby, bouncing on my knee, Wave your hands & shake your feet. Ooohh, baby, you¿re so sweet . . . .¿ The sweetness between a daddy & his little girl is all here -- the walks, the favorite foods, the dancing, the diaper changing. With his signature warmth & wit, author Garrison Keillor, the host of ¿A Prairie Home Companion,¿ turns ordinary daily events into celebrations. He wrote these songs for his young daughter, Maia Grace. Includes a CD sung by Keillor. Color illustrations.

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

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.

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 local baseball star, Gary also experiences the first pangs of a broken heart. With his trademark gift for treading "a line delicate as a cobweb between satire and sentiment"(Cleveland Plain Dealer), Garrison Keillor brilliantly captures a newly minted post-war America and delivers an unforgettable comedy about a writer coming of age in the rural Midwest.

"Gospel Birds" is a collection of nine classic and very funny monologues from the early years of "A Prairie Home Companion." In addition to the title story (about Irma and Ernie Lundeen''s traveling flock of acrobatic, bible-reciting birds), contents include: Pastor Ingquist''s Trip to Orlando Mammoth Concert Tickets Bruno, the Fishing Dog Gospel Birds Meeting Donny Hart at the Bus Stop A Day at the Circus with Mazumbo The Tollerud''s Korean Baby Sylvester Krueger''s Desk Babe Ruth visits Lake Wobegon "Gospel Birds" is Garrison Keillor at his very best--endearing insights, gentle humor and warm affection for the human foibles we all share.

John Tollefson, a fortysomething Norwegian bachelor public-radio manager, falls for Columbia University historian Alida Freeman, while struggling to cope with his curmugeonly father, a controlling boss, a gloomy neurotic staff, bankruptcy, and other trials and tribulations.

Dissatisfied with her life, Puff the cat leaves home and becomes a rich and glamorous model, but eventually returns having found out that it''s better to be who you are.

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.

“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

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.

"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