Ian Frazier

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...

In The Fish's Eye: Essays about Angling and the Outdoors, Ian Frazier 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...

Ian Frazier is one of the most gifted chroniclers of contemporary America. Hogs Wild assembles a decade's worth of his finest essays and reportage, and demonstrates the irrepressible passions and artful digressions that distinguish his enduring body of work. Part muckraker, part adventurer, and part raconteur, Frazier beholds, captures, and occasionally reimagines the spirit of the American experience. He travels down South to examine feral hogs,...

With wit and an unerring eye for detail, acclaimed author Ian Frazier takes readers on a journey through his family's story, his nation's history, and himself Using letters and other family documents, Frazier reconstructs two hundred years of middle-class life, visiting small towns his ancestors lived in, reading books they read, and discovering the larger forces of history that affected them. He observes some of them during the British raid on Danbury,...

Dispatches from the front lines of American culture by the great humorist Ian Frazier, "America's greatest essayist" (Los Angeles Times), has gathered his insights on the most urgent issues of today in Cranial Fracking. From 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...

At the height of the Jazz Age, Ring Lardner was Americas most beloved humorist, equally admired by a popular audience and by literary friends like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson. A sports writer who became a sensation with his comic baseball bestseller, "You Know Me Al," Lardner had a rare gift for inspired nonsense and an ear attuned to the rhythms and hilarious oddities of American speech. He was also a sharp and dispassionate observer of...

The author of Annie John, Lucy, and The Autobiography of My Mother delves into her long-awaited new novel about a complicated modern family, featuring Mr. and Mrs. Sweet and their two children, Heracles and Persephone, who live in the Shirley Jackson house in Vermont. Kincaid discusses her novel with her old friend Ian Frazier (The Cursing Mommy's Book of Days).