Garrison Keillor

Snow is falling all across Minnesota as Mr. and Mrs. James Sparrow awaken in their modest Minneapolis apartment. She adores Christmas; he loathes it. Bound for Christmas in Hawaii, Mr. Sparrow 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.

In Lake Wobegon lives a good Lutheran lady who is quite prepared to die and wishes to be cremated and her ashes placed inside a bowling ball and dropped into the lake, no prayers, no hymns, thank you very much. Meanwhile, the Detmer girl returns from California where she has made a killing in veterinary aromatherapy to marry her boyfrinend Brent aboard Wally's pontoon boat, presided over by her minister, Misty Naylor of the Sisterhood of the Sacred...

Includes twenty-one short stories.

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 celebrated radio host presents his first collection of poetry, featuring his reflections on daily life, love, politics, and religion in verse that reflects his characteristic humor and insight.

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,...

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...

I think people have an absolute ear for what is true, Garrison Keillor told an interviewer. It is this rare and marvelous sense of truthof 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, Letter...

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, Guys ex-girlfriend Sugar O'Toole, the despicable Larry B. Larry, the dreamboat...

All monologues from this collection are from original live broadcasts of A Prairie Home Companion. Contents: Rotten Apples; O Death; The Wise Men; A Trip to Grand Rapids; Truckstop; Smokes; The Perils of Spring; Let Us Pray; Alaska; Uncle Al's Gift; Skinny Dip; Homecoming; Pontoon Boat; Author; Freedom of the Press; Vicks