Get WOBEGON BOY free with any purchase over $25


From now until November 21st, ALL ORDERS over $25 will include a free copy of Wobegon Boy to celebrate the 25th Anniversary of its publication. You need to do nothing except place your order. Through this time, we will be sharing excerpts, quotations, reviews, and other information to celebrate the release of the book. Offer is for a printed copy of the book.


 

Here is a description of the book: A promising young man, John Tollefson, last seen leaving home in Lake Wobegon Days, lands in a lovely town in upstate New York, the manager of a public radio station at a college for the academically challenged children of financially gifted parents. He buys a fine house, finds a wonderful girlfriend named Alida, launches a restaurant, puts on good parties, is presented with radio’s coveted Wally Award, and then it dawns on him that his life is empty, without grandeur. And that grandeur is to be found in the life in which his Lutheran parents brought him up. Ultimately that leads the Wobegon Boy not back to Lake Wobegon, but to New York City. From Kirkus Review “No, that’s not thunder you’re hearing. More likely it’s laughter from the Hereafter, for if there’s any justice here or there, Mark Twain, Will Rogers, and James Thurber have already received their advance copies of this latest installment in the ongoing saga of Minnesota’s endearingly phlegmatic Norwegian-Americans. Wobegon Boy isn’t exactly a novel, but what the hell, who really wants one from the genial creator and host of public radio’s A Prairie Home Companion? What we’re given here is a shred of a story — narrated by Keillor’s protagonist John Tollefson, who escapes the stultifying “cheerfulness” of his homeland (and the girlfriend he doesn’t want to marry) by securing a job as manager of a newly created radio station at upstate New York’s nondescript St. James College. Shades of Jon Hassler close about the Horatio Algerlike John, who picks his way in and out of relationships with assorted academic phonies, potential business partners, and — most importantly — the Amazonian Alida Freeman, a lively university historian who isn’t above any number of amorous tumbles with the smitten Wobegonian, but won’t commit herself to “the doldrums of marriage.” The plot is really only an excuse for comic riffs on such irresistible targets as political correctness, talk radio, feminist militancy, academic unfreedom, the polite impregnability of the Norwegian national character, sexual good manners, New Age music, and Lord knows what all else. There’s a laugh on virtually every page of this fresh reimagining of the young-man-up-from-the-provinces novel, even during the truly touching extended sequence that describes John’s return home for his father’s funeral and reconciliation with exasperating friends and relations he thought he’d seen the last of. And John Tollefson is no mere innocent afoot (consider, for example, his perfectly reasonable theory that the New England Transcendentalists all suffered from chronic constipation). Drollery raised to the level of genuine comic art. And that’s the news from Lake Wobegon.” (October, 1997)
 
 

Here is an excerpt from 'Wobegon Boy' as a teaser:

JOHN Tollefson awoke to the clanging of the clock downstairs, and rose from bed, took out the plastic mouthpiece he wore to keep from grinding his teeth, did his deep knee bends and pushups, and touched his toes. His feet looked gnarly, with shoe marks on them. He definitely was getting a gut on him. He stepped out of his blue pajamas and looked at himself in the mirror on the bedroom-closet door. A middle-aged guy should check himself out every day and assess the devastation, he thought. The flab around the waist, the wobble under the chin. And he needed to practice smiling at himself in the mirror. Young guys can get away with being sullen; it even looks good on them. But on an older guy gloominess looks like indigestion. People think you had too much knackwurst for lunch.

An older guy has to lighten up and keep himself looking fresh. Smile at people. Keep his sense of humor. Even if he feels lonely as a barn owl. The world is interested, up to a point, in the sorrows of women, but it doesn't give a hoot about the problems of a middle-aged Norwegian bachelor -- and why should it? So don't bother being unhappy; it only makes you look like a creep.

He stood over the toilet bowl and peed and half expected the water in the bowl to turn bright red with blood. He'd been expecting catastrophic illness since he turned forty. He'd go off to some specialist in the city and sit in a beige waiting room, thinking about his crumbling innards, pleading with God for mercy, perusing tattered issues of People, thinking, "I am spending some of my precious last hours on earth learning more about Brad Pitt." And proceed to the examining room. Disrobe. Wait for the arrival of the prostate potentate himself, Dr. Oh, and his various benedictions and incantations, and then the presentation of the posterior for the digital exam.

Maybe he should get out of radio and do something distinguished with his life.

CONTINUE READING >>>

 

From now until November 21st, ALL ORDERS over $25 will include a free copy of Wobegon Boy to celebrate the 25th Anniversary of its publication. You need to do nothing except place your order. Through this time, we will be sharing excerpts, quotations, reviews, and other information to celebrate the release of the book. Offer is for a printed copy of the book.
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