Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 - Hardcover

A hilarious coming-of-age novel, Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 serves up the world according to 14-year-old Gary, an endearing geek, a self-described 'tree toad', and a writer in the making whose best friend is his Underwood typewriter. Always with humour, and often with great sympathy, charm and honesty, Garrison Keillor tells the story that both satirizes and celebrates the traumas and the passions of adolescence. The tyrannical teacher, the Sanctified Brethren family members, the arch-enemy older sister, the innocent delights of baseball and his wild imagination are all vividly, gloriously part of Gary's summer. Stories about a talking dog, conversations between God and Jesus, pornographic melodramas, and the 'worst' baseball writing you've ever read will have you rolling. His imagination is fuelled by both his hopeless devotion to the magazine 'High School Orgies', and more importantly his rebellious, glamorous cousin Kate, who writes dark poetry, smokes like a movie star and sometimes doesn't wear a bra. She becomes his pal - though she's 17 and therefore totally beyond his reach - and his muse. When she falls for the local baseball star and becomes pregnant, she also becomes the first girl to break his heart. Garrison Keillor's hilarious new novel takes us back to a newly minted America. With its post-war optimism and Cold War suspicions of outsiders, the 1950s are evoked in unforgettable Wobegon fashion. The simultaneous publication of Lake Wobegon Summer, 1956 and a beautifully packaged book of photography, In Search of Lake Wobegon by Garrison Keillor and photographer Richard Olsenius, will surely be viewed as a publishing event.

Garrison Keillor, 'America's tallest radio humorist', was born in 1942 in a small town in Minnesota, into a family of Scottish fundamental protestants. His father was a railroad clerk and he was the third of six children. As a child, radio and television were discouraged, but the family were expert at entertaining themselves with evenings of storytelling.In 1966 Garrison Keillor graduated from the University of Minnesota, where he earned his tuition working at the campus radio station. His ambition though was to write - three years later the big breakthrough came when he sold a story to the New Yorker. He immediately gave up his job at the radio station to concentrate exclusively on writing but, ironically, it was an assignment from the New Yorker in 1974, which tempted him back to the radio.Writing about the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville brought back childhood memories of the warmth and spontaneity of the medium, and the result of this was to be Keil