New Releases by Garrison Keillor

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.

In Cheerfulness, veteran radio host and author Garrison Keillor reflects on a simple virtue that can help us in this stressful and sometimes gloomy era. Drawing on personal anecdotes from his young adulthood into his eighties, Keillor sheds light on the immense good that can come from a deliberate work ethic and a buoyant demeanor. "Adopting cheerfulness as a strategy does not mean closing your eyes to evil," he tells us; "it means resisting our drift toward compulsive dread and despond." Funny, poignant, thought-provoking, and whimsical, this is a book that will inspire you to choose cheerfulness in your daily life.

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.

Over 2,200 Jokes from America’s favorite live radio show A treasury of hilarity from Garrison Keillor and the cast of public radio’s A Prairie Home Companion. A guy walks into a bar. Eight Canada Geese walk into a bar. A termite jumps up on the bar and asks, “Where is the bar tender?” Drum roll. The Sixth Edition of the perennially popular Pretty Good Joke Book is everything the first five were and more. More puns, one-liners, light bulb jokes, knock-knock jokes, and third-grader jokes (have you heard the one about Elvis Parsley?). More religion jokes, political jokes, lawyer jokes, blonde jokes, and jokes in questionable taste (Why did the urologist lose his license? He got in trouble with his peers). More jokes about chickens, relationships, and senior moments (the nice thing about Alzheimer’s is you can enjoy the same jokes again and again). It all started back in 1996, when A Prairie Home Companion fans laughed themselves silly during the first Joke Show. The broadcast was such a hit that it became an almost-annual gagfest. Then fans wanted to read the jokes, share them, and pass them around, and the first Pretty Good Joke Book was born. With over 200 new and updated jokes, the latest edition promises countless giggles, chortles, and guffaws anyone—fans of the radio show or not—will enjoy.

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.”

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."

Radio personality and author Garrison Keillor delights and astounds in this hybrid memoir/poetry collection that combines anecdotes from his childhood and his "A Prairie Home Companion" years with literary limericks, darkly humorous limericks, extended limericks (aka limericks with porches), and so much more. Limericks are the poems that can be written in the empty spaces between life, Keillor posits, and this compact book illustrates the full range of the form''s utility: thank-you notes to doctors, odes to "Prairie Home" performers, postcard greetings from exotic places, succinct biographies of favorite writers, and scribbles in the margins of Sunday church programs. Readers who have always pined for the perfect limerick hinging on the place name "Schenectady" will at long last be placated. Meanwhile, longtime Keillor fans will gain insight into a whole new side of the bestselling author, whose obsession with limericks goes all the way back to when the bespectacled, lanky youth wearing hand-me-down jeans (from his sister) recited to his Anoka High School class: There was a young man of Anoka Who tried to write a great limerick. He tried and he tried And some were not bad, But something seemed to be missing.

"I''ve spent enough of my life in waiting rooms to have written War and Peace," says Garrison Keillor, "and instead I wrote these limericks."

The celebrated radio host of A Prairie Home Companion 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.

Famous radio private eye Guy Noir leaps from A Prairie Home Companion to the page 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, Guy’s ex-girlfriend Sugar O''Toole, the despicable Larry B. Larry, the dreamboat Scarlett Anderson, Mr. Kress of the FDA–and Guy faces them one by one, as he and Naomi pursue a dream of earning gazillions by selling a surefire method of dramatic weight loss. In this whirlwind caper Guy faces danger, falls in love, and faces off with the capo del capo del grande primo capo Johnny Banana.

Garrison Keillor reads (or sings) all the poems in the book on two CDs inside, with music by Rich Dworsky ''When I was 16, Helen Fleischman assigned me to memorise 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 is a durable good. These 77 of mine include sonnets of praise, some erotic, some lamentations, some street sonnets and a 12-sonnet cycle of months. If anything here offends, I beg your pardon, I come in peace, I depart in gratitude'' - Garrison Keillor

I don''t know much about Lutherans and that is one reason I''ve told stories about them over the years, so I could learn.---From the Introduction Based on Garrison Keillor''s Lake Wobegon monologues, Life among the Lutherans is a collection of stories about the struggles of ordinary people in an imperfect world, the life and work of the pastor who leads them, and the church to whose high standards they aspire in the small town they call home. The stories in Life among the Lutherans reflect everything Keillor fans have come to expect of this master storyteller. Some are familiar, including the quintessentially Lutheran "95 Theses" from Lake Wobegon Days, others are new. Laugh out loud about the church directory filled with photos that are just plain awful. Share the moment when Pastor Ingqvist receives a leather-bound copy of his sermons. Keillor''s command of every little detail of life in Lake Wobegon is bound to entertain, surprise, and make readers---even those who aren''t Lutheran---feel right at home in the mythical community where "all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average."

Clint is one of the old reliables in Lake Wobegon - the treasurer of the Lutheran church and the auto mechanic who starts your car on below-zero mornings. For six years he has run the Fourth of July parade, turning what was once a line of pickup trucks and girls pushing baby carriages that hold their cats into a dazzling spectacle that has attracted the attention of CNN and prompted the governor to put in an appearance as well. The town is dizzy with anticipation. Until, that is, they hear of Clint''s ambition to run for Congress. They''re embarrassed for him. They know him too well - his unfortunate episodes involving vodka sours, his rocky marriage. And then there is his friendship, or whatever it is, with the twenty-four-year-old girl who dresses up as the Statue of Liberty for the parade. It''s rumoured that underneath those robes she is buck naked, and that her torch contains a quart of booze. It''s Lake Wobegon as it''s always been - good, loving people who drive each other crazy.

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.

Every Saturday at 5 p.m. Central, in a packed theater, the lights dim, the crowd hushes, and an old-time radio show called A Prairie Home Companion, hosted by Garrison Keillor goes on the air, live, coast to coast. Our songbook features 20 songs written for and performed on the show, based on Richard Dworsky''s improvised arrangements at the piano: Bad Jokes * Beeboparebop Rhubarb Pie Theme * Brownie & Pete * Guy Noir Theme * Hush Little Baby * Hymn to Winter * Lake Wobegon School Hymn * Limericks (Waltz Me Around Again Willie) * The Lives of the Cowboys Theme * My Minnesota Home * Nonsense Song (A Boy''s Best Friend Is His Mother) * Oh Baby * Polly-Wolly Tunafish * Powdermilk Biscuit Theme * Slow Days of Summer * Song of the Exiles * The Sons of Knute Christmas Dance and Dinner * Tishomingo Blues * Whispering Tuna * Whoop-I-Ti-Yi-Yo.

In 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 success—and the New York publishing scene—is a fickle mistress, indeed. Creatively barren, nearly destitute, and longing for Iris, he accepts a job writing "Ask Mr. Blue," a column doling out advice to the lovelorn. It may not be glamorous work, but through it Wyler discovers what''s really important and sets out to win back the woman he left behind.

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

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.

Many books have been written about the Battle of Britain and the events leading up to it. Some are autobiographies by fighter pilots, some are by historians writing in hindsight, researching documents and including personal memories of the participants. The author of this book was a World War II Spitfire pilot who has previously written and lectured about this battle, and he has presented a thesis in defence of Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, the Chief of Fighter Command.

"This book combines text and image to reveal the real-life origins of the place where "the women are strong, the men are good-looking and the children above average." Keillor meditates on the enduring culture of the county and on the years he spent there as a young writer and an outsider. And a short story of Lake Wobegon, "October," appears here for the first time in print."--BOOK JACKET.

"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 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, Thoreau, Whitman, and Susan B. Anthony.

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.

The first children''s novel by the author of Lake Wobegon Days. Twelve-year-old Rachel''s parents have always been a little eccentric, but might their weirdness be rubbing off on her? Is she becoming the town nerd? And what lies ahead during the long, lonely summer in Sandy Bottom?