English Majors: A Comedy Collection for the Highly Literate (Prairie Home Companion) [Audiobook, Unabridged] [Audio CD]

Garrison Keillor (Author, Performer)

Book Description

Series: Prairie Home Companion | Publication Date: March 4, 2008

Skits and bits from A Prairie Home Companion celebrate the secret society of men and women who possess excellent spelling and punctuation skills.

ENGLISH MAJORS. You know who you are and here is a double-CD celebrating the secret society of those who, though they may be chauffeuring kids to swim lessons or writing Unix programs or frying cheeseburgers, still could, if need be, write a term paper on the water imagery in The Waste Land.

Includes the Six-Minute Hamlet, the Ten-Minute MacBeth,tributes to Hawthorne and Kerouac and Emily Dickinson, a Guy Noir adventure that exposes an M.F.A. scam, the Ballad of John Henry ('John Henry was an English major and poetry was his line. He sat by the window with his yellow legal pad and he wrote one sentence at a time.'), and more.

With guest appearances by Allen Ginsberg, Billy Collins, Roy Blount Jr., Robert Bly, Donald Hall, and Calvin Trillin.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Leave it to Keillor to satirize Guy Noir: Private Eye, by exposing the M.F.A. degree as a tool of organized crime. The parodies of American literature, however, including Dickinson, Frost and Hawthorne, are generally sophomoric. You know whose woods these are. The collection of vintage performances improves in a 10-minute rendition of Macbeth, with the lead character as Mr. Rogers and Lady Macbeth as Julia Child. There are two versions of Hamlet, both of which reduce Ophelia's madness to La, la, la. Yes, that's a quote. The Prairie Home Companion cast members fare better when they move away from parody. One of the best bits involves an English major (Keillor) working at a fast food job and correcting customers' misuse of who or whom. Billy Collins's satirical ode to The Lanyard is both hilarious and astute. There are some nice fillers, including Meryl Streep reading Mary Oliver and Allen Ginsberg's overblown recital of Whitman's Song of Myself. In the end, listeners will feel that these two so-so CDs could have been reduced to one good one. (Feb.)
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Review

You do not have to be a college graduate to enjoy A Prairie Home Companion English Majors; a taste for American poetry and a smattering of knowledge about American literature is enough.
—The Serious Comedy Site

. . . this compilation will certainly evoke laughs from listeners.
—AudioFile

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Product Details

• Audio CD
• Publisher: HighBridge Company; Original radio broadcast; 2.5 hours on 2 CDs edition (March 4, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1598875884
• ISBN-13: 978-1598875881
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 4.9 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #180,665 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #33 in Books > Books on CD > Radio Shows
  • #57 in Books > Books on CD > Music
  • #97 in Books > Humor & Entertainment > Radio > General Broadcasting

More About the Author

Garrison Keillor is the bestselling author of Lake Wobegon Days, Happy To Be Here, Leaving Home, We Are Still Married, Radio Romance, The Book of Guys and Wobegon Boy (available in Penguin Audiobook). He is the host of A Prairie Home Companion on American public radio and a contributor to Time magazine. He lives in Wisconsin and New York City.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars For English Majors or the higly literate!!, June 29, 2008

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S. ERICKSEN "NINONOTE" (ARIZONA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: English Majors: A Comedy Collection for the Highly Literate (Prairie Home Companion) (Audio CD)

I am a huge Garrison Keillor fan - I buy everything I can get my hands on (on audio CD) and it makes my drive time so enjoyable. I stopped listening to this one only because it has so much inside humour that my little non English major brain didn't understand or didn't find humourous. I intend to give in to my brother who lives in Minnesota and has a PHD in English, loved Shakespeare and I know he'll enjoy it better than this music major did.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a major review, September 16, 2008

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Anthony Schaeve "reading is fun" (Crystal Lake, IL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: English Majors: A Comedy Collection for the Highly Literate (Prairie Home Companion) (Audio CD)

I am not an English Major but I "got it". If you haven't read The Scarlet Letter, On the Road, seen Hamlet in the theatre or any of the other pieces of literature recently or ever at all, it is time you read them. The reason they are classics is that they are good stories. The way Garrison Keillor explains it, you get a lot more out of it, than when you took American Lit. in high school or college from someone who was tired of trying to impress morality on someone not particularly interested in that subject. Keillor's interpretation plus thirty years' distance will do wonders for you sometimes.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Kinda funny but esoteric, July 30, 2008

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Cornflake Girl "Andrea" (Bayside, NY) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: English Majors: A Comedy Collection for the Highly Literate (Prairie Home Companion) (Audio CD)

I enjoyed this compilation of English Major inside humor from Garison Keillor, and I did laugh out loud a few times, but the previous reviewer is right in that the humor is very "inside" and esoteric. If you didn't just spend like four years as an undergrad and two years in grad school studying English, you probably won't find these jokes funny, or even get them. But for the nerdy bookworm English major out there, slaving over Tolstoy and rewriting that term paper, this is for you.