Kirjahaku

"Humor Me" is a literary cavalcade of contemporary American funnymen - and funnywomen - of the page. Selected by the renowned humorist Ian Frazier and featuring more than fifty pieces of the greatest comic writing of our time, the book includes such masters of the form as Roy Blount, Jr., Bruce Jay Friedman, Veronica Geng, Jack Handey, Garrison Keillor, Steve Martin, and Calvin Trillin, as well as work by newer comic stars like Andy Borowitz, Larry Doyle, Simon Rich, George Saunders, and David Sedaris. The pieces were published in the past thirty years in such popular magazines as "The New Yorker", "McSweeney's", "The Atlantic", "National Lampoon", and "Outside". But the book also includes a handful of older comic masterpieces that nobody in need of a laugh should ever be without, among them classics by Bret Harte, Elizabeth Bishop, Donald Barthelme, and Mark Twain.

National Bestseller Most travelers only fly over the Great Plains--but Ian Frazier, ever the intrepid and wide-eyed wanderer, is not your average traveler. A hilarious and fascinating look at the great middle of our nation. With his unique blend of intrepidity, tongue-in-cheek humor, and wide-eyed wonder, Ian Frazier takes us on a journey of more than 25,000 miles up and down and across the vast and myth-inspiring Great Plains. A travelogue, a work of scholarship, and a western adventure, Great Plains takes us from the site of Sitting Bull's cabin, to an abandoned house once terrorized by Bonnie and Clyde, to the scene of the murders chronicled in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. It is an expedition that reveals the heart of the American West.

On the Rez is a sharp, unflinching account of the modern-day American Indian experience, especially that of the Oglala Sioux, who now live on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the plains and badlands of the American West. Crazy Horse, perhaps the greatest Indian war leader of the 1800s, and Black Elk, the holy man whose teachings achieved worldwide renown, were Oglala; in these typically perceptive pages, Frazier seeks out their descendants on Pine Ridge--a/k/a the rez--which is one of the poorest places in America today. Along with his longtime friend Le War Lance (whom he first wrote about in his 1989 bestseller, Great Plains) and other Oglala companions, Frazier fully explores the rez as they visit friends and relatives, go to pow-wows and rodeos and package stores, and tinker with a variety of falling-apart cars. He takes us inside the world of the Sioux as few writers ever have, writing with much wit, compassion, and imagination. In the career of SuAnne Big Crow, for example, the most admired Oglala basketball player of all time, who died in a car accident in 1992, Frazier finds a contemporary reemergence of the death-defying, public-spirited Sioux hero who fights with grace and glory to save her followers. On the Rez vividly portrays the survival, through toughness and humor, of a great people whose culture has helped to shape the American identity.

The title essay of "Coyote v. Acme," Ian Frazier's second collection of humorous essays, imagines the opening statement of an attorney representing cartoon character Wile E. Coyote in a product liability suit against the Acme Company, supplier of unpredictable rocket sleds and faulty spring-powered shoes. Other essays are about Bob Hope's golfing career, a commencement address given by a Satanist college president, a suburban short story attacked by the Germans, the problem of issues versus non-issues, and the theories of revolutionary stand-up comedy from Comrade Stalin. From first to last, this is Frazier at his hilarious best.

From the opening essay, "The Bloomsbury Group Live at the Apollo (Liner Notes from the New Best-Selling Album)" to the title piece that discusses ways in which you might begin a romance with your mother ("In today's fast-moving, transient, rootless society, where people meet and make love and part without ever really touching, the relationship every guy already has with his own mother is too valuable to ignore...") to a parody that features Samuel Beckett as a pilot giving an existential in-flight speech to the passengers, the twenty-five comic essays in this delightful collection are nothing short of brilliant. Ian Frazier, long considered one of our most treasured humorists, proves that comedy can be just as smart as it is entertaining.

In The Fish's Eye: Essays about Angling and the Outdoors, Ian Frazier "A Great Storyteller" (Newsweek), and one of the "American Originals" (Washington Post Book World) explores his lifelong passion for fishing, fish, and the aquatic world.He sees the angler's environment all around him-in New York's Grand Central Station, in the cement-lined pond of a city park, in a shimmering bonefish flat in the Florida keys, in the trout streams of the Rocky Mountains. He marvels at the fishing in the turbid Ohio River by downtown Cincinnati, where a good bait for catfish is half a White Castle french fry. The incidentals of the angling experience, the who and the where of it, interest him as much as what he catches and how. The essays (including the famous profile of master angler Jim Deren, late proprietor of New York's tackle store, the Angler's Roost) contain sharply focused observations of the American outdoors, a place filled with human alterations and detritus that somehow remains defiantly unruined. Frazier's simple love of the sport lifts him to straight -ahead angling description that are among the best contemporary writing on the subject.The Fish's Eye brings together twenty years of heartfelt, funny, and vivid essays on a timeless pursuit where so many mysteries, both human and natural, coincide.

"Nobody Better, Better Than Nobody" is a collection of five extended essays that appeared in "The New Yorker" from 1978 to 1986. In the tradition of A. J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell, Ian Frazier raises journalism to high literary art. His vivid stories showcase a strange and wonderful parade of American life, from portraits of Heloise, the syndicated household-hints columnist, and Jim Deren, the urban fly-fisher's guru, to small-town residents in western Kansas preparing to celebrate a historic, mutual massacre, to which they invite the Cheyenne Indians' descendants with the promise of free bowling.

The author of On the Rez re-introduces readers to another side of New York City, including a man who climbed the World Trade Center and an eighty-three-year old typewriter repairman, among other colorful characters. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the YearA Boston Globe Best Book of 2010A Christian Science Monitor Best Book of 2010A San Francisco Chronicle Top 10 Books of 2010A Washington Post Best Book of the YearA Kansas City Star 100 Best Books of 2010A St. Louis Post-Dispatch Best of 2010 In this astonishing new work from one of our greatest and most entertaining storytellers, Ian Frazier trains his perceptive, generous eye on Siberia. With great passion and enthusiasm, he reveals Siberia's role in history--its science, economics, and politics--and tells the stories of its most famous exiles, such as Dostoyevsky, Lenin, and Stalin. At the same time, Frazier draws a unique portrait of Russia since the end of the Soviet Union, and gives a personal account of adventure among Russian friends and acquaintances. A unique, captivating, totally Frazierian take on what he calls the "amazingness" of Russia--Travels in Siberia is "a masterpiece of nonfiction writing--tragic, bizarre, and funny" (San Francisco Chronicle).

Selected pieces on nature, history, politics, and urban culture from a master of the nonfiction narrative. Writing on subjects as divergent as the mega-fires that burned the grasslands of the Great Plains in 2018, the tragic secret life of the manufacturer of maraschino cherries, the world's largest beaver dam, and the invasive Burmese pythons of the Florida Everglades, Ian Frazier captures the multiplicity, the strangeness, and the wonder of contemporary life. This collection of pieces--consisting of features and reportage for The New Yorker beginning in 1970, articles on topics such as COVID and rereading Lolita fifty years later, and work published in the last year--showcases the wide-ranging play of Frazier's imagination. Astute and engaged, he is the supreme chronicler of the everyday, a kind of social and political anthropologist. Fifty years of keen observation and irrepressible curiosity come together in The Snakes That Ate Florida, establishing Frazier as nothing less than the greatest practitioner of the form.

A hilarious--and delightfully profane--novel about the daily frustrations of family life Based on his widely read columns for The New Yorker, Ian Frazier's uproarious first novel, The Cursing Mommy's Book of Days, centers on a profoundly memorable character, sprung from an impressively fertile imagination. Structured as a daybook of sorts, the book follows the Cursing Mommy--beleaguered wife of Larry and mother of two young boys--as she offers tips on how to do various tasks around the home, only to end up on the ground, cursing, surrounded by broken glass. Her voice is somewhere between Phyllis Diller's and Sylvia Plath's: a hilariously desperate housewife with a taste for swearing and large glasses of red wine, who speaks to the frustrations of everyday life. In The Cursing Mommy's Book of Days, Frazier colors his fiction with grace and aplomb, as well as an extra helping of his trademark wicked wit. The Cursing Mommy's failures and weaknesses are our own--and Frazier gives them a loving, satirical spin that is uniquely his own.

PART MUCKRAKER, PART ADVENTURER, AND PART RACONTEUR, FRAZIER BEHOLDS, CAPTURES, AND OCCASIONALLY REIMAGINES THE SPIRIT OF THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE. HOGS WILD OFFERS US AN UTTERLY UNIQUE BRAND OF INQUIRY WITHOUT AN AGENDA, CURIOSITY WITHOUT CALCULATION."A master of both distilled insight and utter nonsense" (The Believer), Ian Frazier is one of contemporary America's most gifted chroniclers. While travelling down south to examine feral hogs, he learns that their presence in a county is a strong indication it votes Republican. He introduces us to a man who, when his house is hit by a supposed meteorite, hopes to transform the errant object into an opportunity for his family, and follows a New York City detective fascinated with rap-music-related crimes. Alongside delighting in the absurdities of contemporary life, the collection further exposes our social reality: pieces on soup kitchens, opioid overdose deaths in Staten Island, and the rise of homelessness in New York City under Mayor Michael Bloomberg. To read Frazier is to become a kind of social and political anthropologist--astute and deeply engaged--with humor never too far behind.

Winner of the 2025 Gotham Book Prize Ian Frazier's magnum opus: a love song to New York City's most heterogeneous and alive borough. Ian Frazier, one of our best observers and describers, has been walking the Bronx for fifteen years. Paradise Bronx goes deep into the eventful and tumultuous history of this amazing New York City borough, a super-vibrant in-between place that attaches the rest of the city to North America. From Jonas Bronck, who bought land from the local Lenape tribes, to the formerly gang-wracked South Bronx, which gave birth to hip-hop, Frazier's loving exploration of this singular cityscape is a richly textured, raucous, moving tour de force about the polyglot culture that is the United States today. During the American Revolution, when the Bronx was disputed territory known as the Neutral Ground, George Washington's troops fought some of the war's decisive battles there. Gouverneur Morris, the most outlandish of the Founding Fathers, who wrote the Preamble to the Constitution and served as ambassador to France during the Terror, owned a huge swath of the Bronx, lived and died there, and put it and the rest of the city on a path to greatness. Frazier shows us how the coming of the railroads and the subways drove the settling of the Bronx in successive waves of migration--Irish, German, Italian, Jewish (think the Grand Concourse), African American, Caribbean, Puerto Rican (J.Lo is one of the Bronx's most famous citizens). The romance of the Yankees, the disaster of the Cross Bronx Expressway, the flowering of hip-hop and rap, the resurgence of community as neighborhood heroes banded together and rebuilt after the years of destruction and fire--all are described and celebrated inFrazier's inimitable voice. This is a book like no other about a quintessential American place and the resilience and resourcefulness of its citizens.

Dispatches from the front lines of American culture by the great humorist Ian Frazier, the two-time winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor, has gathered his insights on the most urgent issues of today in Cranial Fracking. From musings on climate change (what did Al Gore say at his colloquium on the rising temperatures in Hell?) to the state of culture (what do you do when you're afflicted with Loss of Funding?) to Texas (what should we do with Texas?), he has all the answers. Or, at the very least, a lot of questions. Frazier is endlessly curious and perpetually delighted, and seeing the absurdity of the world through his eyes is irresistible. Once more, the author of Hogs Wild and Travels in Siberia has struck oil.

In the early 1970s, the writer Ian Frazier left a small town in Ohio to move to a loft in lower Manhattan. Gone to New York is Frazier's account of the city over the thirty years, a book as full of vitality and charm as the city it describes. It features street scenes from every corner of the metropolis, where every block is an event and where the denizens are larger than life. Meet the man who climbed the World Trade Center, learn the location of Manhattan's antipodes, and follow Frazier down Canal Street in the mid-1970s, to Brooklyn in the 1980s and aboard the F Train in the twenty-first century. Like his literary forebears Joseph Mitchell and A. J. Liebling, Frazier makes us fall in love with America's greatest city all over again - just the way he did.