Ian Frazier: 13 books

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 pieces—one by Mark Twain, one by James Thurber, one by Kurt Vonnegut, and Ian Frazier's 1997 essay "Lamentations...

"A master of both distilled insight and utter nonsense" (The Believer), 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...

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...

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...

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...

A great writer's journey of exploration in an American place that is both strange and deeply familiar. In Ian Frazier's bestselling Great Plains, he described meeting a man in New York City named Le War Lance, "an Oglala Sioux Indian from Oglala, South Dakota." In On the Rez, Frazier...

A Dazzling Russian travelogue from the bestselling author of Great Plains In his astonishing new work, Ian Frazier, one of our greatest and most entertaining storytellers, trains his perceptive, generous eye on Siberia, the storied expanse of Asiatic Russia whose grim renown is but one explanation...

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...

National Bestseller 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...

The author of On Writing Well presents stories and advice on the writing process from Frank McCourt, Annie Dillard, and many more.   For anyone who enjoys reading memoirs—or is thinking about writing one—this collection offers a master class from nine distinguished authors: Russell Baker, Jill...

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...

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, Frazier raises journalism to high literary art. His vivid stories showcase a strange and wonderful parade of American...

Twenty-two humorous essays on topics ranging from Joseph Stalin's theories of revolutionary stand-up comedy, to a commencement address given by a Satanist college President, to the opening statement of an attorney representing Wile E. Coyote in a product liability suit against the Acme company, supplier of unpredictable rocket sleds and faulty spring-powered shoes.