Lake Wobegon Summer 1956

"What makes Keillor a special writer . . . is his capacity to examine the ordinary doings of life and somehow extract little stories that say more about human nature than an institute full of sychiatrists."(Philadelphia Inquirer)

The first novel in four years from "the funniest American writer still open for business" (Time) depicts the most harrowing time of life in Lake Wobegon—adolescence

Meet fourteen-year-old Gary. A self-described "tree toad," a sly and endearing geek, Gary has many unwieldy passions, chief among them his cousin Kate, his Underwood typewriter, and the soft-porn masterpiece High School Orgies. The folks of Lake Wobegon don't have much patience for a kid's ungodly obsessions, and so Gary manages to filter the hormonal earthquake that is puberty and his hopeless devotion to glamorous, rebellious Kate through his fantastic yarns. With every marvelous story he moves a few steps closer to becoming a writer. And when Kate gets herself into trouble with the local baseball star, Gary also experiences the first pangs of a broken heart.

With his trademark gift for treading "a line delicate as a cobweb between satire and sentiment" (Cleveland Plain Dealer), Garrison Keillor brilliantly captures a newly minted postwar America and delivers an unforgettable comedy about a writer coming of age in the rural mid-west.