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Ian Frazier
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Coyote V. Acmeby Ian FrazierISBN 0312420587 (0-312-42058-7)
Softcover, Picador USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Coyote V. Acme'Book summary:Ian Frazier collects some of his funniest essays from The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthlyin Coyote v. Acme. Setting the tone is the title piece, consisting of the legal brief filed on behalf of the hapless character who has been irreparably harmed by manufacturer's negligence while pursuing the Road Runner. An excerpt: "As Mr. Coyote gripped the handlebars, the Rocket Sled accelerated with such sudden and precipitate force as to stretch Mr. Coyote's forelimbs to a length of fifty feet."
Throughout the nearly two-dozen essays, Frazier demonstrates his remarkable gift for language: he parodies everything from New Yorkers' talent for "getting in people's faces," to the IRS (while using some actual government-issued verbiage), and he mixes the classic with the less-than-classic in Boswell's Life of Don Johnson. [via]
Dating Your Momby Ian FrazierISBN 0312421524 (0-312-42152-4)
Softcover, St Martins Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dating Your Mom'More editions of Dating Your Mom:
- Dating Your Mom: ISBN 0241119995 (0-241-11999-5)
Hardcover, Penguin Books, Limited - Dating Your Mom: ISBN 0374135088 (0-374-13508-8)
Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux - Dating Your Mom: ISBN 0140096787 (0-14-009678-7)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA - Dating Your Mom: ISBN 0312421524 (0-312-42152-4)
Softcover, St Martins Pr
- Dating Your Mom: ISBN 0241119995 (0-241-11999-5)
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Familyby Ian FrazierISBN 0060976772 (0-06-097677-2)
Softcover, HarperCollins Canada, Limited
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Family'Book summary:With the same quirky brilliance that drew fans to his previous work, Ian Frazier narrates the history of his family from early colonial days to the present. He reconstructs two hundred years of middle-class life, visiting small towns his ancestors lived in, reading the books they read, discovering the larger forces of history that affected them. He observes family members during the Revolutionary War; he follows others west as they pioneer in the wilderness of Ohio and Indiana, where schoolteachers were paid in whiskey and door hinges were made of bacon ride. He visits the battlefields where they fought the Civil War. He interviews old-timers, uncles, aunts, cousins, maids, a beer-store owner who knew his dad. Family is a poetic epic of facts, a chronicle of a culture's rise and fall, a memorial, a view of American history as romantic as it is unflinching. [via]
The Fish's Eye: Essays About Angling and the Great Outdoorsby Ian FrazierISBN 0374155208 (0-374-15520-8)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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The Fish's Eye: Essays About Angling and the Outdoorsby Ian FrazierISBN 0312421699 (0-312-42169-9)
Softcover, St Martins Pr
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Gone to New York: Adventures in the Cityby Ian Frazier , Jamaica KincaidISBN 031242504X (0-312-42504-X)
Softcover, Picador
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Gone to New York: Adventures in the City'Book summary:Welcome to Ian Frazier's New York, a city more downtown than up, where every block is an event, and where the denizens are larger than life. Meet landlord extraordinaire Zvi Hugo Segal, and the man who climbed the World Trade Center, and an eighty-three-year-old typewriter repairman whose shop on Fulton Street has drawers full of umlauts. Learn the location of Manhattan's antipodes, and meander the length of Route 3 to New Jersey.[via]
Like his literary forbears Joseph Mitchell and A.J. Liebling, Frazier, in his bewitching, inimitable voice, makes us fall in love with America's greatest city all over again, the way he did, arriving as a young man from Hudson, Ohio. In classic evocations of the F train, Canal Street, and Prospect Park, Brooklyn, and in his iconic "Bags in Trees" essay, Frazier gives us New York again, in all its vital and human multiplicity.More editions of Gone to New York: Adventures in the City:
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The Great Plainsby Ian FrazierISBN 0140131701 (0-14-013170-1)
Softcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Great Plains'Book summary:National Bestseller[via]
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 Bulls cabin, to an abandoned house once terrorized by Bonnie and Clyde, to the scene of the murders chronicled in Truman Capotes In Cold Blood. It is an expedition that reveals the heart of the American West. 
It Happened Like Thisby Ian Frazier , Daniil Kharms, Katya ArnoldISBN 0374336350 (0-374-33635-0)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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Lamentations of the Fatherby Ian FrazierISBN 0374281629 (0-374-28162-9)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Lamentations of the Father'Book summary:[via]When The Atlantic Monthly celebrated its 150th anniversary by publishing excerpts from the best writing ever to appear in the magazine, in the category of the humorous essay it chose only four piecesone by Mark Twain, one by James Thurber, one by Kurt Vonnegut, and Ian Fraziers 1997 essay Lamentations of the Father. The title piece of this new collection has had an ongoing life in anthologies, in radio performances, in audio recordings, on the Internet, and in photocopies held by hamburger magnets on the doors of peoples refrigerators. The august company in which The Atlantic put Frazier gives an idea of where on the literary spectrum his humorous pieces lie. Fraziers work is funny and elegant and poetic and of the highest literary aspiration, all at the same time. More serious than a gag writer, funnier than most essayists of equal accomplishment, Frazier is of a classical originality. This collection, a companion to his previous humor collections Dating Your Mom (1985) and Coyote v. Acme (1996), contains thirty-three pieces gathered from the last thirteen years.Past winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor; author of the nonfiction bestsellers Great Plains, Family, and On the Rez; contributor to The New Yorker, Outside, and other magazines, Frazier is the greatest writer of our (or indeed of any) age.More editions of Lamentations of the Father:
Nobody Better, Better Than Nobodyby Ian FrazierISBN 0312422857 (0-312-42285-7)
Softcover, Picador USA
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On the Rezby Ian FrazierISBN 0312278594 (0-312-27859-4)
Softcover, St Martins Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'On the Rez'Book summary:Given that the Great Plains long functioned as a stomping ground for the Oglala Sioux, it was inevitable that Ian Frazier would cross paths with them when he wrote his 1989 chronicle of that sublime flatland. But the encounter between the self-confessed "chintzy middle-class white guy" and his Native American counterparts went so swimmingly that Crazy Horse assumed a starring role in the book. Now Frazier continues his cross-cultural romance in On the Rez. This account of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota is as touching, funny, and maniacally digressive as anything he's written. What's more, he manages to avoid most of the politically correct potholes along the way, producing a vivid, ambivalent (i.e., honest) portrait of a community where the very "landscape is dense with stories."
Much of On the Rez revolves around Le War Lance, whom Frazier first met in Great Plains. This yarn-spinning, beer-swilling figure serves the author as a kind of Native American Virgil, introducing him to the hard facts of reservation life. In fact, their friendship, with its accents of deep affection and dependency, anchors the entire narrative and elicits some typically top-drawer prose:
Le's eyes can be merry and flat as a smile button, or deep and glittering with malice or slyness or something he knows and I never will. He is fifty-seven years old. I have seen his hair, which is black streaked with gray, when it was over two feet long and held with beaded ponytail holders a foot or so apart, and I have seen it much shorter, after he had shaved his head in mourning for a friend who had died.
On the Rez delivers a history of the Oglala nation that spotlights our paleface population in some of its most shameful, backstabbing moments, as well as a quick tour through Indian America. The latter, to be honest, seems a little too conscientiously cooked up from primary sources and news clippings. But elsewhere Frazier is in superb form, reporting everything he sees and hears with enviable clarity and promptly pulling the rug out from under himself whenever he seems too omniscient. Few accounts of reservation life have been this comical; even fewer have moved beyond the poverty and pandemic drunk driving to discern actual, theological wickedness on the premises: "At such moments a sense of compound evil--the evil of the human heart, in league with the original darkness of this wild continent--curls around me like shoots of a fast-growing vine." In the hands of many a writer, the previous sentence might resemble a rhetorical firecracker. In Frazier's, it comes off as a statement of fact--which is only one of the reasons why every American, Native or not, should take a look at this sad, splendid, and surprisingly hopeful book. --James Marcus [via] -
Talk Storiesby Jamaica Kincaid, Ian FrazierISBN 0374272395 (0-374-27239-5)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Talk Stories'Book summary:Restraint, it turns out, is a highly effective critical strategy. In Talk Stories, her collection of New Yorker "Talk of the Town" pieces dating from 1974 to 1983, Jamaica Kincaid writes prose as bare and bright as a light bulb. Her sentences are so clean that she seems to know exactly what she's talking about. And that's what allows these morsels of reportage to transcend their genre and become small, pointed, thrilling judgments on the world. In "Romance," a piece on a conference of Harlequin romance writers, Kincaid writes, "The women, each of whom looked freshly coiffed, sat at tables in the middle of which were large bowls of yellow and gold chrysanthemums. The women seemed very excited." There we have subjectivity in the cool guise of objectivity. On the other hand, when Kincaid is for something, she comes right out and says it. The oddity is where these hosannas land. A knitting shop in Connecticut, for example, is "perhaps the nicest store in the world, because it is run and owned by perhaps one of the nicest women in the world--a woman named Beatrice Morse Davenport."
In her introduction, Kincaid writes: "All sentences, all paragraphs about this part of my life, my life as a writer, must begin with George Trow." The latter, who discovered Kincaid, wrote the kind of dry, clever occasional prose that flourished in the New Yorker in the 1970s and 1980s. Kincaid's Trow-like writing is the weakest, most attention-hungry in the book. "Party" is written in the style of a Nancy Drew mystery, "Two Book Parties" is written as a quiz, and "Expense Account" is just that--an expense account of a press breakfast, including the coy entry, "Cost of clothes other reporters wore to press breakfast (too complicated to make even a wild guess)." These pieces too closely resemble her mentor's work--clever but not actually, you know, funny. The structural fanciness seems cheap next to Kincaid's fine, goofily opinionated reporting. Still, after these wobbly forays into experimentation, she began to write the fiction that made her famous, so her fooling around seems to have paid off in the end. --Claire Dederer [via]
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Way to Great Plainsby Ian FrazierISBN 0374107459 (0-374-10745-9)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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