Garrison Keillor

It's Lake Wobegon as you've imagined it: a tightly knit community that sometimes draws you home and sometimes gives you wings to fly away.

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

"I think people have an absolute ear for what is true," Garrison Keillor told an interviewer. It is this rare and marvelous sense of truth-of laughter, joy, and compassion and situations-that makes Keillor such a brilliant and beloved storyteller. The collection includes: Your Book Saved My Life, Mister, End of the Trail, Meeting Famous People, Family Honeymoon Al Denny, Basketball, After A Fall, The Babe, We Are Still Married, Drowning, Attitude,...

"When I was 16, Helen Fleischman assigned me to memorize 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...

JOHNNY APPLESEED

The touching story of the benevolent naturalist who roamed the Ohio Valley in the early 1800s, planting apple orchards, making friends, and spreading good will along his way. Known to early settlers as a gentle soul with a reverence for all life, Johnny never missed a chance to save an abandoned animal or to savor a delicious apple pie.

RIP VAN WINKLEThis haunting early American tale from Washington Irving follows the likeable

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See what WLT was "really like" before it became the radio station featured in the Robert Altman film. In 1926, brothers Ray and Roy Soderbjerrg plunge into radio by founding Station WLT (With Lettuce and Tomato) in order to rescue their failing restaurant and become the Sandwich Kings of South Minneapolis. For the next 25 years, the "Friendly Neighbor" station produces a dazzlingnot to mention, oddarray of shows and stars. Brilliantly weaving together...

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...

The chronicle of another chapter in the life and times of the residents of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota.

Garrison Keillor is the consummate storyteller, gifted with the rare ability - both in print and in performance - to hold an audience spellbound with his tales of ordinary people whose lives contain extraordinary moments of humor, tenderness, and grace. Lake Wobegon Days is an affectionately humorous tribute to the small sleepy Minnesotan town of Lake Wobegon, notable for the statue to the Unknown Norwegian, the duck-hunting Sons of Knute, the sleepwalking...

The humorist and radio host examines the "politics of kindness," offering a series of nostalgic reminiscences, meditations, and observations on the core values--the defense of the powerless, the protection of the social compact, and government as a force for good--of the democratic ideal.