Garrison Keillor Books In Order

Lake Wobegon Books In Publication Order

  1. Lake Wobegon Days (1985)
  2. Leaving Home (1987)
  3. We Are Still Married (1989)
  4. Wobegon Boy (1997)
  5. Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 (2001)
  6. In Search of Lake Wobegon (2006)
  7. Pontoon (2007)
  8. Liberty (2008)
  9. Life Among the Lutherans (2009)
  10. Pilgrims (2009)

Good Poems Books In Publication Order

  1. Good Poems for Hard Times (2005)
  2. Good Poems, American Places (2010)

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. The Sandy Bottom Orchestra (1996)
  2. Me By JimmyValente, Governor Of Minnesota (1999)
  3. Love Me (2003)
  4. A Christmas Blizzard (2009)

Collections In Publication Order

  1. WLT: A Radio Romance / Radio Romance (1989)
  2. The Book of Guys (1993)
  3. Truckstop and Other Lake Wobegon Stories (1995)
  4. Keillor Christmas (2000)
  5. A Prairie Home Collection (2006)
  6. The Keillor Reader (2009)
  7. 77 Love Sonnets (2009)
  8. Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny (2012)
  9. O, What a Luxury (2013)
  10. A Luxury of Limericks (2018)
  11. Living with Limericks (2019)

Picture Books In Publication Order

  1. Cat, You Better Come Home (1995)
  2. The Old Man Who Loved Cheese (1996)
  3. Daddy’s Girl (2005)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. Happy to Be Here (1982)
  2. Ten Years (1984)
  3. Late Harvest (1991)
  4. A Prairie Home Commonplace Book (1999)
  5. A Prairie Home Companion Songbook (2000)
  6. Homegrown Democrat (2004)
  7. Pretty Good Joke Book (2015)
  8. Sounding Off! (2016)
  9. That Time of Year: A Minnesota Life (2020)

Best American Short Stories Books In Publication Order

  1. The Best Short Stories of 1915 (1916)
  2. The Best Short Stories of 1916 (1916)
  3. The Best Short Stories of 1917 (1917)
  4. The Best Short Stories of 1918 (1918)
  5. The Best Short Stories of 1919 (1919)
  6. The Best Short Stories of 1921 (1921)
  7. The Best Short Stories of 1922 (1922)
  8. The Best Short Stories of 1923 (1923)
  9. The Best Short Stories 1924 (1924)
  10. The Best Short Stories of 1925 (1925)
  11. The Best Short Stories 1926 (1926)
  12. The Best Short Stories 1927 (1927)
  13. The Best Short Stories of 1928 (1928)
  14. The Best Short Stories of 1929 (1929)
  15. The Best Short Stories 1930 (1930)
  16. The Best Short Stories 1931 (1931)
  17. The Best Short Stories of 1932 (1932)
  18. The Best Short Stories 1933 (1933)
  19. The Best Short Stories 1934 (1934)
  20. The Best Short Stories 1935 (1935)
  21. The Best Short Stories 1936 (1936)
  22. The Best Short Stories 1937 (1937)
  23. The Best Short Stories of 1938 (1938)
  24. 50 Best American Short Stories, 1915-1939 (1939)
  25. The Best Short Stories 1939 (1939)
  26. The Best Short Stories of 1940 (1940)
  27. The Best Short Stories 1941 (1941)
  28. The Best American Short Stories 1942 (1942)
  29. The Best American Short Stories 1943 (1943)
  30. The Best American Short Stories 1944 (1944)
  31. The Best American Short Stories 1945 (1945)
  32. The Best American Short Stories 1946 (1946)
  33. The Best American Short Stories 1947 (1947)
  34. The Best American Short Stories 1948 (1948)
  35. The Best American Short Stories 1949 (1949)
  36. The Best American Short Stories 1950 (1950)
  37. The Best American Short Stories 1951 (1951)
  38. The Best American Short Stories 1952 (1952)
  39. The Best American Short Stories 1953 (1953)
  40. The Best American Short Stories 1955 (1955)
  41. The Best American Short Stories 1956 (1956)
  42. The Best American Short Stories 1957 (1957)
  43. The Best American Short Stories 1958 (1958)
  44. The Best American Short Stories 1959 (1959)
  45. The Best American Short Stories 1960 (1960)
  46. The Best American Short Stories 1961 (1961)
  47. The Best American Short Stories 1962 (1962)
  48. The Best American Short Stories 1963 (1963)
  49. The Best American Short Stories 1964 (1964)
  50. The Best American Short Stories 1965 (1965)
  51. The Best American Short Stories 1966 (1966)
  52. The Best American Short Stories 1967 (1967)
  53. The Best American Short Stories 1968 (1967)
  54. The Best American Short Stories of 1969 (1969)
  55. The Best American Short Stories 1970 (1970)
  56. The Best American Short Stories 1971 (1971)
  57. The Best American Short Stories 1972 (1972)
  58. The Best American Short Stories 1973 (1973)
  59. The Best American Short Stories 1974 (1974)
  60. The Best of Best American Short Stories 1915-1950 (1975)
  61. The Best American Short Stories 1975 (1975)
  62. The Best American Short Stories 1976 (1976)
  63. The Best American Short Stories 1977 (1977)
  64. The Best American Short Stories 1978 (1978)
  65. The Best American Short Stories 1979 (1979)
  66. The Best American Short Stories 1980 (1980)
  67. The Best American Short Stories 1981 (1981)
  68. The Best American Short Stories 1982 (1982)
  69. The Best American Short Stories 1983 (1983)
  70. The Best American Short Stories 1984 (1984)
  71. The Best American Short Stories 1985 (1985)
  72. The Best American Short Stories 1986 (1986)
  73. The Best American Short Stories 1987 (1987)
  74. The Best American Short Stories 1988 (1988)
  75. The Best American Short Stories 1989 (1989)
  76. The Best American Short Stories of the Eighties (1990)
  77. The Best American Short Stories 1990 (1990)
  78. The Best American Short Stories 1991 (1991)
  79. The Best American Short Stories 1992 (1992)
  80. The Best American Short Stories 1993 (1993)
  81. The Best American Short Stories 1994 (1994)
  82. The Best American Short Stories 1995 (1995)
  83. The Best American Short Stories 1996 (1996)
  84. The Best American Short Stories 1997 (1997)
  85. The Best American Short Stories 1998 (1998)
  86. The Best American Short Stories 1999 (1999)
  87. The Best American Short Stories 2000 (2000)
  88. The Best American Short Stories of the Century (2000)
  89. The Best American Short Stories 2001 (2001)
  90. The Best American Short Stories 2002 (2002)
  91. The Best American Short Stories 2003 (2003)
  92. The Best American Short Stories 2004 (2004)
  93. The Best American Short Stories 2005 (2005)
  94. The Best American Short Stories 2006 (2006)
  95. The Best American Short Stories 2007 (2007)
  96. The Best Short Stories of 1921, and the Yearbook of the American Short Story (2007)
  97. The Best American Short Stories1921 (2007)
  98. The Best American Short Stories 2008 (2008)
  99. The Best American Short Stories 2009 (2009)
  100. The Best American Short Stories 2010 (2010)
  101. The Best American Short Stories 2011 (2011)
  102. The Best American Short Stories 2012 (2012)
  103. The Best American Short Stories 2013 (2013)
  104. The Best American Short Stories 2014 (2014)
  105. The Best American Short Stories 2015 (2015)
  106. 100 Years of The Best American Short Stories (2015)
  107. The Best American Short Stories 2016 (2016)
  108. The Best American Short Stories 2017 (2017)
  109. The Best American Short Stories 2018 (2018)
  110. The Best American Short Stories 2019 (2019)
  111. The Best American Short Stories 2020 (2020)

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Garrison Keillor Books Overview

Lake Wobegon Days

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. This exclusive recording of Garrison Keillor reading a carefully edited abridgement of the book and includes a few segments taken from live performances recorded during a fundraising tour for public radio stations in 1985. 1987 Grammy Award winner Table of Contents Tape 1 Prologue; Home; Forbears; Sumus Quod Sumus; Protestant Tape 2 Protestant; Summer; School Tape 3 Fall; Winter Tape 4 Footnote 95 Theses 95; Spring; Revival

Leaving Home

Revisit the beguiling comic world of Lake Wobegon. In the first collection of Lake Wobegon monologues, Keillor tells readers ore about some of the people from Lake Wobegon Days and introduces some new faces. ‘Leaving Home is a book of exceptional charm…
delightful…
genuinely touching’. The Wall Street Journal. Available in early December.

We Are Still Married

‘Prairie Home Companion’ fans, Garrison Keillor is alive and well, with humor intact. The wry Minnesotan, transplanted to the land of subways and skyscrapers, is still dishing up his peculiar brand of warmth and wit. This new collection contains tales of love fumbled and recovered, satiric social comment, and letters on marriage and fatherhood.

Wobegon Boy

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. Caught up in his own ambitions, John visits home in Minnesota to sit in the Sidetrack Tap and the Chatterbox Cafe and listen to the talk he has heard all his life, and in that familiar landscape he discovers what is truly important to him. It all comes down to the Lake Wobegon code: Cheer Up, Make Yourself Useful, Mind Your Manners, and Avoid Self Pity.

Lake Wobegon Summer 1956

‘What makes Keillor a special writer…
is his capacity to examine the ordinary doings of life and somehow extract little stories that say more about human nature than an institute full of sychiatrists.’Philadelphia Inquirer The first novel in four years from ‘the funniest American writer still open for business’ Time depicts the most harrowing time of life in Lake Wobegon adolescence 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 po*rn 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 marvelous 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 postwar America and delivers an unforgettable comedy about a writer coming of age in the rural mid west.

Pontoon

A fresh and funny Lake Wobegon novel about a woman with a secret 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 boyfriend Brent aboard Wally’s Pontoon boat, presided over by her minister, Misty Naylor of the Sisterhood of the Sacred Spirit. Brent arrives on Thursday. On Saturday, a delegation of renegade Lutheran pastors from Denmark come to town on their tour of America, their punishment for having denied the divinity of Jesus. And Barbara Peterson, whose mother, Evelyn, left the startling note about cremation and the bowling ball, is in love with a lovely fat man who slips around town in the dim light and reconnoiters with her at the Romeo Motel.

An the then there is Raoul of the cigars and tinted shades and rainbow sportscoat and his long phone message ‘Hey, Precious’ after the angel of death has already come and gone.

All is in readiness for the wedding the giant shrimp shish kebabs, the French champagne, the wheels of imported cheese, the pate with whole peppercorns, the hot air balloon, the flying Elvis, the Pontoon boat, and the giant duck decoys and then something else happens.

It is Lake Wobegon as you’ve imagined it good loving people who drive each other slightly crazy.

Liberty

A national holiday in Lake Wobegon is always gaudy and joyful. But what is going on between Clint Bunsen and Miss Liberty?

Clint Bunsen 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 an event of dazzling spectacle. Blazing bands, marching units, cannons, horses, a fireworks show, and the famous Living Flag one thousand men and women wearing red, white, or blue, standing in formation have 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 rumored 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.

Life Among the Lutherans

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 ’95Theses’ 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.’

Pilgrims

Wobegon goes abroad in this rousing and moving story of a group trip to Rome

Margie Krebsbach dreams up the idea of a trip to Rome, hoping to get her husband Carl to make love to her he’s been sleeping across the hall and she has no idea why. She finds a patriotic purpose for the journey. A Lake Wobegon boy, Gussy Norlander, died in the liberation of Rome, 1944, and his grave, according to his elderly brother, Norbert, is in a neglected weed patch near the Colosseum. So it’s decided they will go to clean Gussy’s final resting place. Margie is unprepared for the enthusiastic response fifty people want to go with her, including her nemesis, the mayor of Lake Wobegon, Carl’s bossy sister, Eloise, Mr. Berge the town drunk, and her treacherous mother in law. Margie fends off some of the would be travelers with a graphic handout on the dangers of typhus and food poisoning and the seriousness of diarrhea, but ten applicants remain, though Carl is not sure he wants to go after all. At this, a heartbroken Margie gets the motley crew to the airport and aboard the plane, and then discovers one of the secret pleasures of travel safely away from Lake Wobegon, the Pilgrims‘ memories are quickened and they recall long forgotten incidents. In the warm circle of kinship, as they enter alien territory, they tell stories of astonishing frankness and self revelation all delivered with Keillor’s trademark humor.

Good Poems for Hard Times

When Garrison Keillor published Good Poems, he touched a chord in readers across America. The anthology of poems he selected for their wit, their simplicity, their passion, and their utter clarity in the face of everything else a person has to deal with inspired thousands to buy what was for many their first book of poetry. Now, in Good Poems for Hard Times, Keillor has pondered over the archives of his beloved Writer’s Almanac radio show to select a batch of consoling, rousing, and truthful poems guaranteed to raise flagging spirits or to inspire those in need of a dose of wisdom or honesty. But these poems are not about suffering. They re intended to reach us and stricken friends by holding out a picture of the grace of ordinary life. Above all, this eclectic anthology, including works from Raymond Carver, Emily Dickinson, Charles Simic, Billy Collins, Robert Frost, Kenneth Rexroth, and many more, fit Keillor s definition of good : memorable, beautifully worded, and accessible. They re not highbrow. They re not stuffy. But when hard times send us skidding into the meridian, the poems collected here are what we need them to be: just plain good.

Good Poems, American Places

Another bestselling anthology from Garison Keillor beautiful verses rooted in the American landscape. Garrison Keillor, the editor of Good Poems and Good Poems for Hard Times, host of The Writer’s Almanac, and all around arbiter of fine American poetry, introduces another inspiring collection by a range of poets, some beloved favorites and others brash unknowns, organized by regions of America. From Nantucket to Knoxville, Manhattan to Minnesota, the heart can be exalted anywhere. Think of these poems as postcards from Billy Collins, Nikki Giovanni, William Carlos Williams, Naomi Shihab Nye, Gary Snyder, Mary Oliver, and many more. Like the previous Good Poems collections, this volume celebrates the high spirited, the witty and antic and jazzy voice that in many ways defines the land of the free. Choosing poems full of humor, sharp insight, and warmth, Garrison Keillor once again makes good poetry accessible and immensely enjoyable.

The Sandy Bottom Orchestra

Beloved author and radio host Garrison Keillor now brings his storytelling talents to children with The Sandy Bottom Orchestra. Twelve year old Rachel has always known that her parents were a little eccentric, and now she fears that their weirdness is rubbing off on her. When Rachel is given an opportunity to play with the Dairyland Symphony Orchestra, she wonders if her music will be enough to sustain her through the long, lonely summer.

Me By JimmyValente, Governor Of Minnesota

An uproarious political satire about a professional wrestler who’s elected governor ‘For a professional wrestler with a shaved head and a Fu Manchu to be elected governor of Minnesota all I can say is, WOW. Election Day, 1998, was the greatest day in my life. It will be surpassed only by Inauguration Day 2001.’ So reveals Jimmy Big Boy Valente to his ghostwriter Garrison Keillor in the opening pages of ME. With all the press attention focused on Jimmy and his sensational life, he has decided to set the record straight and tell his own story from his illegitimate birth and unhappy childhood to his Vietnam War experience, his career as world heavyweight champion of professional wrestling, and his come from behind electoral triumph last November. Jimmy told his story to Garrison one weekend the two spent on Maui in January, and Jimmy said, ‘Print it,’ and Viking, not wanting to alienate the big guy, will put the book on sale nationwide on March 1, 1999. And what a story it is…
Jimmy was conceived in 1954 on a ten foot oak table at a Minneapolis country club, and given up for adoption, to be raised by Arv and Gladys Oxnard, who named him Clifford. A fearful child, persecuted by his stepsister Eunice who marked an ‘A’ on his forehead, chased by big dogs and gangs, Clifford has a redemptive encounter with a circus freak that leads to a program of body building and enlistment in the Navy. Clifford enlists under the name Jimmy Valente, and is accepted into the top secret WALRUS program Water Air Land Rising Up Suddenly. In Vietnam, his unit vanquishes hordes of Viet Cong, assisted by Jimmy’s defector buddy Victor Charlie, ‘The Rodent,’ who later comes to haunt Jimmy. When his tour of duty ends, he makes his way to Alaska, where he signs up with a wrestling promoter and creates the ring persona of ‘The Flower Child’ with daffodils on his head and wearing beads and sandals, a classical wrestling ‘heel.’ From wrestlers such as The Duke of Dubuque and Svend the Yellow Toothed, Jimmy learns the trade and, in one dramatic fall, meets his true love, Lacy Larson, and reinvents himself as ‘Big Boy’ a new persona modelled on James Arness, Larry of the Three Stooges, Spiro Agnew, The Grand Exalted Potentate of the Zuhrah Shrine, and Bo Diddley, taking the best from each. By incorporating both good and evil into one character, Big Boy breaks through the old stereotypes and brings wrestling into the modern era. He assembles his Super Team and goes on the road for twelve years, earning millions of dollars and introducing explosives, monster trucks, chain saws, guillotines, and cruise missles into the sport. At his peak as a wrestler, Jimmy is approached by Earl Woofner, chairman of the Ethical Party of Minnesota, anxious to find a gubernatorial candidate to break the liberal chokehold and open up politics to common sense and honesty. Jimmy throws his hat into the ring for the 1998 election and rides around Minnesota in a rented motor home, campaigning on a simple platform that he is not a politician, will never lie, will do his best, and that ‘it will be fun, doggone it’ , and he is swept to victory. Jimmy closes his book with a glimpse of his future plans: a match to fight Mashimoto Ishi, the 800 pound Emperor of the East, for six million dollars, and a run for President. ‘Al Gore, look out,’ he predicts, ‘you’re obsolete. The fringe has become the center.’ And that’s the story of Jimmy Big Boy Valente, as told to Garrison Keillor.

Love Me

When Larry Wyler heads east from Minnesota to New York in pursuit of the celebrated life of the writers he admires and the three martini lunch, he leaves behind Iris, the college sweetheart he married. When he abandons the rural flats of St. Paul for the fabled high rise housing William Shawn and his famous magazine, Wyler stumbles into meteoric success as a writer and a womanizer. However, he’s soon brought low by an even quicker series of failures on both fronts. Iris catches Wyler in flagrante, living the New York high life, and when The New Yorker gives him the boot the jig is up. A chastened man, Wyler returns to Minnesota, where the only writing job he can get is as an advice columnist for the lovelorn. Writing under the pen name ‘Mr. Blue,’ Wyler doles out wry, knowing, and practical advice about seduction and mating to the heartbroken and the lonely. And only slowly, painfully, does Wyler figure out for himself how, after losing love, you can eventually get it back. From one of America’s most beloved writers comes a hilarious and heartfelt novel about ambition, success, and failure as well as the virtues of real love and a steady writing job.

A Christmas Blizzard

The inimitable Garrison Keillor spins ‘a Christmas tale that makes Dickens seem unimaginative by comparison’ Charlotte Creative Loafing Snow is falling all across the Midwest as James Sparrow, a country bumpkin turned energy drink tycoon, and his wife awaken in their sky rise apartment overlooking Chicago. Even down with the stomach bug, Mrs. Sparrow yearns to see The Nutcracker while James yearns only to escape the faux cheer, the bitter cold, the whole Christmas season. An urgent phone call from his hometown of Looseleaf, North Dakota, sends James into the midst of his lunatic relatives and a historic blizzard. As he hunkers weather the storm, the electricity goes out and James is visited by a parade of figures who deliver him an epiphany worthy of the season, just in time to receive Mrs. Sparrow’s wonderful Christmas gift. Garrison Keillor’s holiday farce is the perfect gift for the millions of fans who tune into A Prairie Home Companion every week.

WLT: A Radio Romance / Radio Romance

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 dazzling not to mention, odd array of shows and stars. Brilliantly weaving together the real lives and radio lives of his characters, Garrison Keillor has given us a comic, poignant, and slightly steamy novel, full of romance, intrigue, tough business, and loose living.

The Book of Guys

In this collection of stories you’ll meet a bunch of memorable guys including Lonesome Shorty, a cowpoke torn between the proud life in the saddle and the comforts of warm apartments and women; Buddy the teen age leper in Sioux Falls; Earl Grey the great tea inventor and former Republican child; Casey at the bat in Mudville again; Dionysus the god of wine; and Roy Bradley, boy broadcaster. Brilliantly funny, touching, and acute, The Book of Guys reveals the perilous situation of guys today. Includes: Mid life Crisis of Dionysus, Herb Johnson, the God of Canton, Casey at the Bat Road game version, Lonesome Shorty, Don Gionvanni, Marooned, Buddy the Leper, The Country Mouse and the City Mouse.

The Keillor Reader

An eclectic collection of essays that offer a shot of clarity and wisdom or just an honest laugh

Garrison Keillor is famous as the host of the radio show A Prairie Home Companion, now in its twenty seventh year and heard by more than four million listeners each week. His most recent Lake Wobegon novel, Pontoon, was an instant New York Times bestseller that received phenomenal reviews from coast to coast. And he’s become the arbiter of fine American poetry through the Good Poems series and as the voice of The Writer s Almanac. But Keillor s sharpest insights and sense of humor shine through most brilliantly in his essays.

Culled from his syndicated newspaper column, The Old Scout, and pieces written for Time magazine and The Atlantic Monthly among others, The Keillor Reader will be embraced by readers who fell in love with Alice through Calvin Trillin s memoirs, laughed out loud with David Sedaris in Me Talk Pretty One Day, or winced knowingly as they read I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron. The perfect gift, The Keillor Reader is chock full of notions about how to navigate life s murkier waters, all told with the bracing wit and beautiful turns of phrase that only this literary minded Midwesterner can deliver.

77 Love Sonnets

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 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

Features music by Rich Dworsky.

Please note content contains adult themes.

Cat, You Better Come Home

Leaving for Europe to become the ”cat food queen” and changing her name to Clarice, Puff lives the life of a star as she is wined and dined all over the continent, until disaster strikes and all Puff wants to do is go back home. SLJ. K. ‘

The Old Man Who Loved Cheese

A picture book in verse, about an old man who is addicted to smelly cheese until his family leaves him in protest and a court order bans him from indulging in anything more offensive than immature cheddar.

Daddy’s Girl

All the sweetness of a daddy’s special relationship with his little girl is captured in this charming picture book. With his signature wit and warmth, Garrison Keillor turns everyday events — from diaper-changing and sharing favorite foods to a walk down the street — into celebrations.

Lively illustrations bring to life the songs Keillor wrote for his own daughter. This delightful package also includes a four-song CD of the author’s live performances.

Happy to Be Here

In these reflections on our lives and times, Keillor invites readers to join ‘The Shy Rights Movement’, to drop in at ‘The People’s Shopper’, and to hear the truth behind the Cinderella legend as explained in the consciousness raised lingo of ‘My Stepmother Myself’.

A Prairie Home Commonplace Book

On July 6, 1974, about twelve Minnesotans filed into an auditorium in St. Paul to watch the first live Saturday afternoon broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion. The host and writer, Garrison Keillor, came out in a white suit and hat and sang the theme song, ‘Look who’s coming through that door, I think we’ve met somewhere before,’ accompanied by the twin guitars of his pals Bill Hinkley and Judy Larson. And so began one of the longer runs in radio.

The show’s inspiration was an assignment by The New Yorker to cover the last performance of the Grand Ole Opry in Ryman Auditorium in Nashville in March of that year: ‘I stood in the wings at Ryman, behind the rope rigging, and watched the musicians onstage and listened to the pickers in the stairwell and out by the Opry’s backdoor and I thought, ‘A person could do this.’ I went back to St. Paul, wrote the piece, talked to Bill Kling at Minnesota Public Radio, and we started ‘Prairie Home.”

Almost a thousand broadcasts later and tours to forty four states, Canada, and Great Britain, the show is heard every Saturday night by over 3 million listeners across the US.

For fans of Prairie Home Companion, the Commonplace Book contains a selection of scripts, songs, poems, monologues and photographs of the show and many of its regular performers. Guy Noir is here, Dusty and Lefty, Bob the Young Artist, Gloria, plus duct tape, rhubarb pie, a drama about dying flies and another about ants, an ode to plumbers, limericks, Peter Ostroushko’s recipe for borscht, and a tale about a warm spring Sunday in Lake Wobegon when the organist stepped on a bass pedal during a sermon on Job. Learn how guests are booked, how the stage is set, what Tom Keith uses to make his sound effects, how the audio engineers work. And who selects the greetings that are read on the air. PLUS The New Yorker story that inspired the show its first appearance in book form.

A Prairie Home Companion Songbook

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.

Homegrown Democrat

In a book that is at once deeply personal and intellectually savvy, Homegrown Democrat is a celebration of liberalism as the politics of kindness. In his inimitable style, Keillor draws on a lifetime of experience amongst the hardworking, God fearing people of the Midwest and pays homage to the common code of civic necessities that arose from the left: Protect the social compact. Defend the powerless. Maintain government as a necessary force for good. As Keillor tells it, these are articles of faith that are being attacked by hard ass Republican tax cutters who believe that human misery is a Dickensian fiction. In a blend of nostalgic reminiscence, humorous meditation, and articulate ire, Keillor asserts the values of his boyhood the values of Lake Wobegon that do not square with the ugly narcissistic agenda at work in the country today. A thoughtful, wonderfully written book, Homegrown Democrat is Keillor’s love letter to liberalism, the older generation, John F. Kennedy, the University of Minnesota, and the yellow dog Democrat city of St. Paul that is sure to amuse and inspire Americans just when they need it most.

The Best American Short Stories 1981

Short Stories by Ann Beattie, John Updike, Cynthia Ozick, Louis D. Rubin, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, Elizabeth Tallent, Hortense Calisher, Joyce Carol Oates, Elizabeth Hardwick, and many others.

The Best American Short Stories 1983

Short Stories by Ann Tyler, Bill Barich, John Updike, Carolyn Chute, Ursula K. Le Guin, Raymond Carver, and many others.

The Best American Short Stories 1986

Short Stories by Ann Beattie, Ethan Canin, Joy Williams, Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, Alice Munro, Thomas McGuane, Lord Tweedsmuir, Donald Barthelme, Raymond Carver, and many others.

The Best American Short Stories of the Eighties

The 1980s were one of the most fertile and controversial times for the Amer ican short story. Rich in craft and variety, this collection includes such c lassic and beloved stories as Peter Taylor’s ‘The Old Forest,’ Raymond Carve r’s ‘Cathedral,’ and other works by Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Banks, and a host of exciting, newer talents. Hardcover edition also available. Houghton Mifflin

The Best American Short Stories 1993

The preeminent annual collection of short fiction features the writing of John Updike, Alice Munro, Wendell Berry, Diane Johnson, Lorrie Moore, Stephen Dixon, and Mary Gaitskill.

The Best American Short Stories 1994

These twenty short stories boldly and insightfully explore the extremes of human emotions. In her story ‘Night Talkers,’ Edwidge Danticat reunites a young man and the elderly aunt who raised him in Haiti. Anthony Doerr brings readers a naturalist who discovers the surprising healing powers of a deadly cone snail. Louise Erdrich writes of an Ojibwa fiddler whose music brings him deep and mysterious joy. Here are diverse and intriguing characters a kidnapper, an immigrant nanny, an amputee blues musician who are as surprised as the reader is at what brings them happiness. In his introduction, Walter Mosley explores the definition of a good short story, and writes, ‘The writers represented in this collection have told stories that suggest much larger ideas. I found myself presented with the challenge of simple human love contrasted against structures as large as religion and death. The desire to be loved or to be seen, represented on a canvas so broad that it would take years to explain all the roots that bring us to the resolution.’ Each of these stories bravely evokes worlds brim*ming with desire and loss, humanity and possibility. Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected and most popular of its kind. Lending a fresh perspective to a perennial favorite, Walter Mosley has chosen unforgettable short stories by both renowned writers and exciting newcomers. The Best American Short Stories 2003 features poignant tales that explore the nuances of family life and love, birth and death. Here are stories that will, as Mosley writes in his introduction, ‘live with the reader long after the words have been translated into ideas and dreams. That’s because a good short story crosses the borders of our nations and our prejudices and our beliefs.’Dorothy AllisonEdwidge DanticatE. L. DoctorowLouise ErdrichAdam HaslettZZ PackerMona SimpsonMary Yukari Waters

The Best American Short Stories 1995

These twenty short stories boldly and insightfully explore the extremes of human emotions. In her story ‘Night Talkers,’ Edwidge Danticat reunites a young man and the elderly aunt who raised him in Haiti. Anthony Doerr brings readers a naturalist who discovers the surprising healing powers of a deadly cone snail. Louise Erdrich writes of an Ojibwa fiddler whose music brings him deep and mysterious joy. Here are diverse and intriguing characters a kidnapper, an immigrant nanny, an amputee blues musician who are as surprised as the reader is at what brings them happiness. In his introduction, Walter Mosley explores the definition of a good short story, and writes, ‘The writers represented in this collection have told stories that suggest much larger ideas. I found myself presented with the challenge of simple human love contrasted against structures as large as religion and death. The desire to be loved or to be seen, represented on a canvas so broad that it would take years to explain all the roots that bring us to the resolution.’ Each of these stories bravely evokes worlds brim*ming with desire and loss, humanity and possibility. Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected and most popular of its kind. Lending a fresh perspective to a perennial favorite, Walter Mosley has chosen unforgettable short stories by both renowned writers and exciting newcomers. The Best American Short Stories 2003 features poignant tales that explore the nuances of family life and love, birth and death. Here are stories that will, as Mosley writes in his introduction, ‘live with the reader long after the words have been translated into ideas and dreams. That’s because a good short story crosses the borders of our nations and our prejudices and our beliefs.’Dorothy AllisonEdwidge DanticatE. L. DoctorowLouise ErdrichAdam HaslettZZ PackerMona SimpsonMary Yukari Waters

The Best American Short Stories 1996

Each fall, The Best American Short Stories provides a fresh showcase for this rich and unpredictable genre. Selected from an unusually wide variety of publications, the choices for 1996 place stories from esteemed national magazines alongside those from some of the smallest and most innovative literary journals. Contributors include Joyce Carol Oates, Mary Gordon, Robert Olen Butler, Alice Adams, Lynn Sharon Schwartz, and an array of stunning new talent.

The Best American Short Stories 1997

The preeminent short fiction series since 1915, The Best American Short Stories is the only annual that offers the finest works chosen by a distinguished best selling guest editor. This year, E. Annie Proulx’s selection includes dazzling stories by Tobias Wolff, Donald Hall, Cynthia Ozick, Robert Stone, Junot D’az, and T. C. Boyle as well as an array of stunning new talent. In her introduction, Proulx writes that beyond their strength and vigor, these stories achieve ‘a certain intangible feel for the depth of human experience, not uncommonly expressed through a kind of dry humor.’ As ever, this year’s volume surprises and rewards.

The Best American Short Stories 1998

Edited by beloved storyteller Garrison Keillor, this year’s volume promises to be full of humor, surprises, and, as always, accomplished writing by new and familiar voices. The preeminent short fiction series since 1915, The Best American Short Stories is the only volume that annually offers the finest works chosen by a distinguished best selling author.

The Best American Short Stories 1999

‘What I look for most in a story,’ writes Amy Tan in her introduction to this year’s volume of The Best American Short Stories, ‘what I crave, what I found in these twenty one, is a distinctive voice that tells a story only that voice can tell.’ Tan found herself drawn to wonderfully original stories that satisfied her appetite for the magic and mystery she loved as a child, when she was addicted to fairy tales. In this vibrant collection, fantasy and truth coexist brilliantly in new works by writers such as Annie Proulx, Lorrie Moore, Nathan Englander, and Pam Houston. ‘The Sun, the Moon, the Stars,’ by Junot Diaz, features a young man trying to stave off heartbreak in a sacred cave in Santo Domingo. In ‘Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter,’ by Chitra Divakaruni, a mother moves from India to California to be closer to her son, only to sacrifice something crucial along the way. In Melissa Hardy’s haunting story ‘The Uncharted Heart,’ a geologist unearths a shocking secret in the wilds of northern Ontario. ‘Maybe I’m still that kid who wants to see things I’ve never seen before,’ writes Tan. ‘I like being startled by images I never could have conjured up myself.’ With twenty one tales, each a fabulously rich journey into a different world, The Best American Short Stories 1999 is sure to surprise and delight.

The Best American Short Stories 2000

Still the only anthology shaped each year by a different guest editor always a preeminent master of the form THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES is the essential yearbook of the American literary scene. Here are the most talked about short stories of the year alongside undiscovered gems. In his introduction, guest editor E. L. Doctorow writes, ‘Here is the felt life conferred by the gifted storyteller…
who always raises two voices into the lonely universe, the character’s and the writer’s own.’ Doctorow has chosen a compelling variety of voices to usher in the new millennium, attesting to the astonishing range of human experience our best writers evoke. /Content /EditorialReview EditorialReview Source Amazon. com Review /Source Content When a great annual collection comes out, it’s hard to know the reason why. Was there a bumper crop of high quality stories, or was this year’s guest editor especially gifted at winnowing out the good ones? Either way, the 2000 edition of The Best American Short Stories is a standout in a series that can be uneven. Its editor, E.L. Doctorow, seems to have a fondness for the ‘what if?’ story, the kind of tale that posits an imagination prodding question and then attempts to answer it. Nathan Englander’s ‘The Gilgul of Park Avenue’ asks: What if a WASPy financial analyst, riding in a cab one day, discovers to his surprise that he is irrevocably Jewish? In ‘The Ordinary Son,’ Ron Carlson asks: What if you are the only average person in a family of certifiable geniuses? And Allan Gurganus’s ‘He’s at the Office’ asks: What if the quintessential postwar American working man were forced to retire? This last story is narrated by the man’s grown son, who at the story’s opening takes his dad for a walk. Though it’s the present day, the father is still dressed in his full 1950s businessman regalia, including camel hair overcoat and felt hat. The two walk by a teenager. ‘The boy smiled. ‘Way bad look on you, guy.”

My father, seeking interpretation, stared at me. I simply shook my head no. I could not explain Dad to himself in terms of tidal fashion trends. All I said was ‘I think he likes you.’

The exchange typifies the writing showcased in this anthology: in these stories, again and again, we find a breakdown of human communication that is sprightly, humorous, and devastatingly complete. A few more of the terrific stories featured herein: Amy Bloom’s ‘The Story,’ a goofy metafiction about a villainous divorcee; Geoffrey Becker’s ‘Black Elvis,’ which tells of, well, a black Elvis; and Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘The Third and Final Continent,’ a story of an Indian man who moves to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Like the collection itself, Lahiri’s story amas*ses a lovely, funny mood as it goes along. Claire Dederer

The Best American Short Stories of the Century

Since the series’ inception in 1915, the annual volumes of The Best American Short Stories have launched literary careers, showcased the most compelling stories of each year, and confirmed for all time the significance of the short story in our national literature. Now The Best American Short Stories of the Century brings together the best of the best fifty five extraordinary stories that represent a century’s worth of unsurpassed accomplishments in this quintessentially American literary genre. Here are the stories that have endured the test of time: masterworks by such writers as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Saroyan, Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever, Eudora Welty, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, Raymond Carver, Cynthia Ozick, and scores of others. These are the writers who have shaped and defined the landscape of the American short story, who have unflinchingly explored all aspects of the human condition, and whose works will continue to speak to us as we enter the next century. Their artistry is represented splendidly in these pages. THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES series has also always been known for making literary discoveries, and discovery proved to be an essential part of selecting the stories for this volume too. Collections from years past yielded a rich harvest of surprises, stories that may have been forgotten but still retain their relevance and luster. The result is a volume that not only gathers some of the most significant stories of our century between two covers but resurrects a handful of lost literary gems as well. Of all the great writers whose work has appeared in the series, only John Updike’s contributions have spanned five consecutive decades, from his first appearance, in 1959, to his most recent, in 1998. Updike worked with coeditor Katrina Kenison to choose stories from each decade that meet his own high standards of literary quality.

The Best American Short Stories 2001

Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred and twenty outstanding works. That selection is pared down to the twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected and most popular of its kind.A wonderfully diverse collection, this year’s BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES from Hollywood to Hong Kong, from the Jersey shore to Wales, considering the biggest issues: love, war, health, success. Edited by the critically acclaimed, best selling author Barbara Kingsolver, The Best American Short Stories 2001 includes selections by Rick Bass, Ha Jin, Alice Munro, John Updike, and others. Highlighting exciting new voices as well as established masters of the form, this year’s collection is a testament to the good health of contemporary short fiction in this country.

The Best American Short Stories 2002

Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to the twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected and most popular of its kind.

This year’s Best American Short Stories features a rich mix of voices, from both intriguing new writers and established masters of the form like Michael Chabon, Edwidge Danticat, Richard Ford, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Arthur Miller. The 2002 collection includes stories about everything from illicit love affairs to family, the immigrant experience and badly behaved children stories varied in subject but unified in their power and humanity. In the words of this year’s guest editor, the best selling author Sue Miller, ‘The American short story today is healthy and strong…
These stories arrived in the nick of time…
to teach me once more what we read fiction for.’

The Best American Short Stories 2003

Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected and most popular of its kind. Lending a fresh perspective to a perennial favorite, Walter Mosley has chosen unforgettable short stories by both renowned writers and exciting newcomers. The Best American Short Stories 2003 features poignant tales that explore the nuances of family life and love, birth and death. Here are stories that will, as Mosley writes in his introduction, ‘live with the reader long after the words have been translated into ideas and dreams. That’s because a good short story crosses the borders of our nations and our prejudices and our beliefs.’Dorothy Allison Edwidge Danticat E. L. Doctorow Louise Erdrich Adam Haslett ZZ Packer Mona Simpson Mary Yukari Waters

The Best American Short Stories 2004

Story for story, readers can’t beat The Best American Short Stories series…
Each year it offers the opportunity to dive into the current trends and fresh voices that define the modern American short story’ Chicago Tribune. This year’s most beloved short fiction anthology is edited by the best selling novelist Sue Miller, author of While I Was Gone, and, most recently, The World Below. The volume includes stories by Edwidge Danticat, Jill McCorkle, E. L. Doctorow, Arthur Miller, and Akhil Sharma, among others. /Content /EditorialReview EditorialReview Source Amazon. com Review /Source Content In her opening remarks to The Best American Short Stories 2002, guest editor Sue Miller notes the difficulty of reading fiction produced during 2001, the year of the September 11 terrorist attacks. She also remarks that by the time she had finalized her 20 selections, this act of reading had restored her faith both in fiction’s significance and its ability to tap into timeless themes. The 2002 anthology includes stories best described as realist fiction or traditional fiction, many set in contemporary times. The tales range from E.L. Doctorow’s ‘A House on the Plains,’ a murder set at the turn of the century, to pieces with more recent settings, like ‘Puppy’ by Richard Ford, which shows how a New Orleans couple deals or doesn’t deal with the appearance of a stray dog. Both Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Nobody’s Business’ and Edwidge Danticat’s ‘Seven’ deftly portray the disconnection a semi assimilated Indian American and Haitian American couple experience both as partners and as U.S. citizens. Leonard Michael’s ‘Nachman from Los Angeles,’ in contrast, adds some levity to the mix. Miller adds in her preface that maybe next year the tales will depart further from tradition, but judging from this volume no departure is necessary: the selections take the reader on a delightful journey through some of America’s best contemporary writers. Jane Hodges

The Best American Short Stories 2005

The Best American Series First, Best, and Best Selling

The Best American series has been the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction since 1915. Each volume’s series editor selects notable works from hundreds of periodicals. A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the very best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected and most popular of its kind.

The Best American Short Stories 2005 includes

Dennis Lehane Tom Perrotta Alice Munro Edward P. Jones Joy Williams Joyce Carol Oates Thomas McGuane Kelly Link Charles D’Ambrosio Cory Doctorow George Saunders and others

Michael Chabon, guest editor, is the best selling author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys, A Model World, and, most recently, The Final Solution. His novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000.

The Best American Short Stories 2006

While a single short story may have a difficult time raising enough noise on its own to be heard over the din of civilization, short stories in bulk can have the effect of swarming bees, blocking out sound and sun and becoming the only thing you can think about, writes Ann Patchett in her introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2006.

This vibrant, varied sampler of the American literary scene revels in life’s little absurdities, captures timely personal and cultural challenges, and ultimately shares subtle insight and compassion. In The View from Castle Rock, the short story master Alice Munro imagines a fictional account of her Scottish ancestors emigration to Canada in 1818. Nathan Englander s cast of young characters in How We Avenged the Blums confronts a bully dubbed The Anti Semite to both comic and tragic ends. In Refresh, Refresh, Benjamin Percy gives a forceful, heart wrenching look at a young man s choices when his father along with most of the men in his small town is deployed to Iraq. Yiyun Li s After a Life reveals secrets, hidden shame, and cultural change in modern China. And in Tatooizm, Kevin Moffett weaves a story full of humor and humanity about a young couple s relationship that has run its course.

Ann Patchett brought unprecedented enthusiasm and judiciousness to The Best American Short Stories 2006 , writes Katrina Kenison in her foreword, and she is, surely, every story writer s ideal reader, eager to love, slow to fault, exquisitely attentive to the text and all that lies beneath it.

The Best American Short Stories 2007

In his introduction to this volume, Stephen King writes, Talent does more than come out; it bursts out, again and again, doing exuberant cartwheels while the band plays ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’…
Talent can t help itself; it roars along in fair weather or foul, not sparing the fireworks. It gets emotional. It struts its stuff. In fact, that’s its job. Wonderfully eclectic, The Best American Short Stories 2007 collects stories by writers of undeniable talent, both newcomers and favorites. These stories examine the turning points in life when we, as children or parents, lovers or friends or colleagues, must break certain rules in order to remain true to ourselves. In T. C. Boyle s heartbreaking Balto, a thirteen year old girl provides devastating courtroom testimony in her father s trial. Aryn Kyle s charming story Allegiance shows a young girl caught between her despairing British mother and motherly American father. In The Bris, Eileen Pollack brilliantly writes of a son struggling to fulfill his filial obligations, even when they require a breach of morality and religion. Kate Walbert s stunning Do Something portrays one mother s impassioned and revolutionary refusal to accept her son s death. And in Richard Russo s graceful Horseman, an English professor comes to understand that plagiarism reveals more about a student than original work can. New series editor Heidi Pitlor writes, Stephen King s dedication, unflagging hard work, and enthusiasm for excellent writing shone through on nearly a daily basis this past year…
We agreed, disagreed, and in the end very much concurred on the merit of the twenty stories chosen. The result is a vibrant assortment of stories and voices brim*ming with attitude, deep wisdom, and rare compassion.

The Best Short Stories of 1921, and the Yearbook of the American Short Story

Edward Joseph Harrington O’Brien 1890 1941 was an American author, poet, editor and anthologist. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and attended Boston College and Harvard University. He was noted for compiling and editing an annual collection of The Best Short Stories by American authors at the beginning of the twentieth century, and also a series of The Best Short Stories by British authors. They proved to be highly influential and popular. He was also a noted author, his works including White Fountains 1917 and The Forgotten Threshold 1918.

The Best American Short Stories 2008

This brilliant collection, edited by the award winning and perennially provocative Salman Rushdie, boasts a magnificent array Library Journal of voices both new and recognized. With Rushdie at the helm, the 2008 edition reflects the variety of substance and style and the consistent quality that readers have come to expect Publishers Weekly. We all live in and with and by stories, every day, whoever and wherever we are. The freedom to tell each other the stories of ourselves, to retell the stories of our culture and beliefs, is profoundly connected to the larger subject of freedom itself. Salman Rushdie, editorThe Best American Short Stories 2008 includes KEVIN BROCKMEIER ALLEGRA GOODMAN A. M. HOMES NICOLE KRAUSS JONATHAN LETHEM STEVEN MILLHAUSER DANIYAL MUEENUDDIN ALICE MUNRO GEORGE SAUNDERS TOBIAS WOLFF and others

The Best American Short Stories 2009

Edited by critically acclaimed, best selling author Alice Sebold, the stories in this year’s collection serve as a provacative literary ‘antenna for what is going on in the world’ Chicago Tribune. The collection boasts great variety from ‘famous to first timers, sifted from major magazines and little reviews, grand and little worlds’ St. Louis Post Dispatch, ensuring yet another rewarding, eduring edition of the oldest and best selling Best American.

The Best American Short Stories 2010

Edited by the award winning, best selling author Richard Russo, this year’s collection boasts a satisfying chorus of twenty stories that are by turns playful, ironic, somber, and meditative Wall Street Journal. With the masterful Russo picking the best of the best, America s oldest and best selling story anthology is sure to be of enduring quality Chicago Tribune this year.

The Best American Short Stories 2011

With a New AfterwordAs a prizewinning foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Geraldine Brooks spent six years covering the Middle East through wars, insurrections, and the volcanic upheaval of resurgent fundamentalism. Yet for her, headline events were only the backdrop to a less obvious but more enduring drama: the daily life of Muslim women. Nine Parts of Desire is the story of Brooks’ intrepid journey toward an understanding of the women behind the veils, and of the often contradictory political, religious, and cultural forces that shape their lives. Defying our stereotypes about the Muslim world, Brooks’ acute analysis of the world’s fastest growing religion deftly illustrates how Islam’s holiest texts have been misused to justify repression of women, and how male pride and power have warped the original message of a once liberating faith.

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