A national holiday in Lake Wobegon is always gaudy and joyful. But when the major planner behind the Fourth of July parade and the twenty-four-year-old girl who dresses up as the Statue of Liberty develop a close "friendship," rumors begin to fly. What will happen is anybody's guess as CNN and the governor put in an appearance in Lake Wobegon--home to a good loving people who drive each other crazy.

A mysterious virus has infiltrated the good people of Lake Wobegon, transmitted via unpasteurized cheese made by a Norwegian bachelor farmer, the effect of which is episodic loss of social inhibition. Mayor Alice, Father Wilmer, Pastor Liz, the Bunsens and Krebsbachs, formerly taciturn elders, burst into political rants, inappropriate confessions, and rhapsodic proclamations, while their teenagers watch in amazement. Meanwhile, a wealthy outsider...

Includes twenty-one short stories.

During the summer of 1956, fourteen-year-old geek Gary struggles with the hormonal pains and obsessions of puberty as he experiences a passionate devotion to his rebellious cousin Kate and pursues his dream of becoming a writer, but when Kate gets into trouble with the local basketball star, Gary is forced to deal with the first pangs of a broken heart.

The chronicle of another chapter in the life and times of the residents of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. Lake Wobegon is having a boom year thanks to millennial entrepreneurship--AuntMildred's.com Gourmet Meatloaf, for example, or Universal Fire, makers of artisanal firewood seasoned with sea salt. Meanwhile, the author flies in to give eulogies at the funerals of five classmates, including a couple whom he disliked, and he finds a wave of narcissism crashing...

" In That Time of Year, Garrison Keillor looks back on his life and recounts how a Brethren boy with writerly ambitions grew up in a small town on the Mississippi in the 1950s and, seeing three good friends die young, turned to comedy and radio. Through a series of unreasonable lucky breaks, he founded A Prairie Home Companion and put himself in line for a good life, including mistakes, regrets, and a few medical adventures. PHC lasted forty-two years,...

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,...

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.

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...