Love Me - Hardcover

Garrison Keillor, 'America's tallest radio humorist', was bor n 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

An obscure Minneapolis writer is touched by the "kiss of fame" in Keillor's latest, a sly romantic comedy-cum-literary satire that begins when Larry Wyler's first novel, Spacious Skies, takes off and hits the bestseller list. Wyler longs to accept an invitation to go to Manhattan and work for the New Yorker, but his earnest, stodgy wife, Iris, is content to stay in St. Paul and continue her work with the elderly. The siren song of New York proves too strong for Wyler, though, and the writer reports to legendary editor William Shawn and rubs elbows with the likes of Updike and Salinger. But publisher Harold Ross has been succeeded by a mafioso called Tony Crossandotti, who forces Wyler into a deadly showdown after the hapless writer fails to get a poem published for the thug. In an equally cheeky storyline, Wyler begins writing an advice column for a Minneapolis paper when his work at the New Yorker flags and his second novel tanks, and Keillor uses the conceit to pen a series of running letters from various lovelorn characters who call on "Mr. Blue" to help sort out their lonely lives (reprising his real-life turn as an advice columnist for the online magazine Salon). The material on Wyler's up-and-down relationship with Iris is less successful, although Keillor's prose does turn touching down the stretch when they reconcile and put Wyler's numerous infidelities behind them. With his trademark droll humor, Keillor exposes the foibles of human nature and pokes fun at our more absurd conventions. The icing on the cake is the use of some obviously autobiographical material from Keillor's publishing experiences in this wry send-up of literary life.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.