Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide by Nick Rennison

Author:Nick Rennison
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: A & C Black Publishers Ltd
Published: 2009-09-26T16:00:00+00:00

KEILLOR, Garrison (born 1942)

US novelist and broadcaster

In the United States, Keillor is known as much as a radio broadcaster as a writer – his show A Prairie Home Companion has been on air for more than thirty years – and his stories of small-town life gain much if they are heard in his homely Midwestern voice. (It is easy enough to find audiobooks of Keillor reading his own work.) Lake Wobegon Days, which first appeared in 1985, drew upon pieces he had produced for radio and was an amiable, humorous account of life in the fictional township of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. He has followed it with a succession of other books which record the everyday adventures and misadventures of the people who live in the town. There are some harsh critics who see little but bland nostalgia in Keillor’s stories but what lurks beneath the surface of his elaborate anecdotes and comic setpieces can often seem more like melancholic awareness of what is being lost than folksy celebration of small-town virtues. He is a steelier and less sentimental writer than initially he appears.

Keillor’s other Lake Wobegon books are Leaving Home, We Are Still Married, Wobegon Boy, Lake Wobegon Summer 1956, Pontoon and Liberty. Radio Romance is a non-Wobegon novel set in the 1930s Golden Age of Radio, Love Me a novel about a best-selling writer having a mid-life crisis, The Book of Guys a collection of comic short stories about men (and gods) in difficulties. Homegrown Democrat is a book which outlines his political and social values and beliefs.

Read on

Pontoon (a more recent entrant in the Lake Wobegon series in which octogenarian Evelyn Peterson passes away in the night, leaving idiosyncratic instructions for her funeral – her ashes are to be poured into a bowling ball and dropped into a lake– and a letter which reveals a secret life and a secret lover).

Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (small town American life from an earlier generation); >> Bill Bryson, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid; Sinclair Lewis, Main Street; Kent Haruf, Plainsong.

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