Word: keillors
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...Happy to Be Here, Keillor...
...Happy to Be Here, Keillor...
NONFICTION: After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection, James Davidson and Mark Lytle ∙ Happy to Be Here, Garrison Keillor Lectures on Russian Literature, Vladimir Nabokov ∙ Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor, Diana Trilling ∙ Scenes of Childhood, Sylvia Townsend Warner
This is a nostalgia gone delightfully mad, and the reader is happy to inhale it by the cubic yard. But it comes flirtatiously close to novelizing, a practice Keillor claims in a funny preface to have forsworn after one grotesquely bad unpublishable failure. He writes short pieces, he says, in homage to The New Yorker's former great infield of James Thurber, A.J. Liebling, S.J. Perelman and E.B. White...
...Keillor loves names and hypnotizes himself by repeating them in the best long pieces in his book. There is the "North Dakota Prairie Queen, the jewel of the plains," a luxury train he invents in a reminiscence by a crazed old railroader. Dance bands played regularly on the Prairie Queen, and they had great names: "The Kolachy Brothers, the Big Pisek Hot Band, Cecil Pootz and His Grafton Spuds, the Wonderbar Orchestra, and yes, the great Bill Baroon and His Paloreenies . . ." A marvelously spurious history of radio in Minneapolis produces "Wingo Beals and His Blue Movers," who lost their SunRise...