Lake Wobegon Days

“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 neighborliness and strength….His true subject is how daily life is shot with grace. Keillor writes a prose that can be turned to laughter, to tears…to compassion or satire, to a hundred effects. He is a brilliant parodist.” —San Francisco Chronicle

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.

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.

2004 Minnesota Book Award Winner The Midwestern small town has long held an iconic place in American culture--from the imaginings of Sinclair Lewis's Main Street and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio to Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon. But the reality is much more complex, as the small town has been a study in transition from its very inception. In A Place Called Home, editors Richard O. Davies, Joseph A. Amato, and David R. Pichaske offer the first comprehensive examination of the Midwestern small town and its evolving nature from the 1800s to the present. This rich collection, gleaned from the best writings of historians, novelists, social scientists, poets, and journalists, features not only such well-known authors as Sherwood Anderson, Carol Bly, Willa Cather, Hamlin Garland, Langston Hughes, Garrison Keillor, William Kloefkorn, Sinclair Lewis, Susan Allen Toth, and Mark Twain but also many lesser known and exceptionally talented writers. Five chronological sections trace the founding, growth, and decline of the Midwestern town, and introductory comments illuminate its ever-changing face. The result is a wide-ranging collection of writings on the community at the heart of America.

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 . . .

Autobiographical sketches with stories about the inhabitants of Lake Wobegon, an imaginary Minnesota town. Learn about the statue of the Unknown Norwegian and why Lake Wobegon never made it onto the map, and many other small-town stories.

Cheerfulness is a choice. Happiness is circumstantial, joy is for special occasions, bliss is brief (except for blissful ignorance), jubilation is rare and elation even more so, contentment is lovely but easily broken, glee is often cruel, triumph is beyond the pale, delight is inexplicable, gaiety was possible once and now it belongs to Dan and George, but cheerfulness is a simple practical option: put yesterdaybehind and seize the day. Try it tomorrow morning and make it work.