Ian Frazier

A collection of essays spanning twenty years celebrates the author's passion for fishing and details his ability to see the angler's environment all around him.

"On the Rez, by Ian Frazier, is about modern-day American Indians, especially the storied Oglala Sioux, who live now 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 nineteenth century, and Black Elk, the holy man whose teachings became known around the world, were Oglala; Frazier visits their descendants on Pine Ridge Reservation - "the rez" - now one of America's poorest places. With his longtime friend Le War Lance and other Oglala, Frazier drives around the rez as they visit friends and relatives, go to powwows and rodeos and package stores, and tinker with various falling-apart cars. In the career of SuAnne Big Crow, the most admired Oglala basketball player of all time, who died in a car accident in 1992, Frazier finds a modern reemergence of the Sioux hero who saves her people: and he learns about the ancient and enduring Sioux concept of the hero, in its pulse-quickening, death-defying, public-spirited glory.". "Most of all, with compassion and imagination, Frazier brings us into the private world of the reservation. He portrays the survival, through toughness and humor, of a great people whose culture has shaped American identity."--BOOK JACKET.

When Ian Frazier's first collection of humorous essays, Dating Your Mon, was published in 1986, Time's reviewer Paul Gray called it "hilarious" and warned readers to " read sparingly... By 1996 another collection may appear." And he was rights. Frazier's new collection, Coyote v. Acme, includes twenty-two more side-splitting glimpses into some of the more oddball corners of the American mind. The title essay imagines the opening statement of an attorney for 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 the golfing career of comedian Bob Hope, a commencement address given by a Satanist college president, a suburban short story attacked by Germans, the problem of issues versus non-issues, and the theories of revolutionary stand-up comedy from Comrade Stalin.

Provides programs for drawing a variety of pictures on an Apple IIe computer.

The author introduces another side of New York, including a man who climbed the World Trade Center and an eighty-three-year old typewriter repairman, among other characters.

"A literary cavalcade ... 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, ... [and] classics by Bret Harte, Elizabeth Bishop, Donald Barthelme, and Mark Twain." -- Dust jacket.

Includes essays by Joseph Brodsky, William H. Gass, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Edward Hoagland, Edna O'Brien, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, John Edgar Wideman, and Tobias Wolff, among others.

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.

Includes essays by Thomas McGuane, Cynthia Ozick, Susan Sontag, and Gay Talese, among others.

"The great humorist Ian Frazier gathers his dispatches from the frontlines of American culture"--

"A generous selection of Frazier's most sophisticated and uproarious feature stories"-- "Part muckraker, part adventurer and part raconteur, the author, in a humorous collection of stories, collects his best essays and reportage from the past 10 years that beholds, captures and occasionally reimagines the spirit of the American experience. By the author of Travels in Siberia."--