Jean Shepherd

Before Garrison Keillor and Spalding Gray there was Jean Shepherd: a master monologist who spun the materials of his All-American childhood into immensely resonant and utter hilarious stories.

All Others Pay Cash

In God We Trust

The stories that inspired a popular holiday film chronicle an American family's trials and joys in a small town in Depression-era Indiana, capturing Ralphie Potter's campaign to get a Red Ryder air rifle for Christmas, his duel with bullies, and other epi

A Christmas Story

“[Jean] Shepherd is that very rare breed, a homespun humorist cut from the same Midwestern cloth as Mark Twain and George Ade.”—Saturday Review Jean Shepherd was one of America’s favorite humorists, his most notable achievement being the creation of the indefatigable Ralphie Parker and his quest for a BB gun in the holiday classic A Christmas Story. But he was so much more, a comic Garrison Keillor–like figure whose unique voice transcended the airwaves and affected a whole generation of nostalgic Americans. The Ferrari in the Bedroom is Shepherd’s wry, affectionate look at the hang-ups and delusions of Americans in the 1970s. From his sardonic assessment of fads such as the nostalgia craze (“Thinking that the old days were good is a terrible sickness. Everything was just as bad then as it is now.”) to a modest proposal for the foundation of S.P.L.A.T. (The Society for the Prevention of the Leaving of Animal Turds), Jean Shepherd provides a generous measure of his special brand of wise and warm humor as an antidote for some of America’s more ridiculous obsessions.

The Ferrari in the Bedroom

From the wild and wacky world of favorite funnyman Jean Shepherd, a dozen truer-than-life tales of tailgating on the Jersey Tumpike, infuriating infants, and other everyday catastrophes, defeats, and humiliations that are the familiar fate of Americans everywhere. Jean Shepherd was one of America’s favorite humorists, his most notable achievement being the creation of the indefatigable Ralphie Parker and his quest for a BB gun in the holiday classic A Christmas Story. But he was so much more, a comic Garrison Keillor–like figure whose unique voice transcended the airwaves and affected a whole generation of nostalgic Americans. A Fistful of Fig Newtons is classic Jean Shepherd—sidesplittingly funny and sardonically irreverent. It is a brilliant comic assessment of American life—all of them delivered in Jean Shepherd’s witty, classy, unforgettable style.

A Fistful of Fig Newtons

The popular radio announcer uses his whimsical imagination to record the events of his Indiana boyhood

Jean Shepherd

About

Books

Join the club