Praise for Garrison Keillor and The Keillor Reader

 

“Keillor is very clearly a genius. His range and stamina alone are incredible. . . . And he’s a masterful storyteller.”

—Sam Anderson, Slate

“Keillor spin[s] his entire life experience into tales that may be fantastical but are always . . . true to life . . . honoring it, in all its wild permutations and possibilities. . . . This gem of a book will resuscitate you.”

—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Heir to Mark Twain, James Thurber, and E. B. White, Keillor offers more than laconic, sometimes-rueful, reports from the fictional Midwestern town of Lake Wobegon. Besides selected Prairie Home Companion monologues—written in an adrenaline rush on the morning of each show—this collection contains poetry, fiction, and assorted essays, each introduced by autobiographical musings. . . . Lovely.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Unaffectedly good-natured, entirely accessible, and informed on every page by [the] shrewd and tolerant observation that ‘there’s a lot of human nature in everybody.’”

—Howard Frank Mosher, The Washington Post

“Wry, wistful, nostalgic . . . By turns cheerful and fatalistic, homespun and outrageous.”

—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

“Keillor’s Lake Wobegon books have become a set of synoptic gospels, full of wistfulness and futility and yet somehow spangled with hope.”

—Thomas Mallon, The New York Times Book Review