Criticism

Brennan, Geraldine. "Hung Up With the Strings." The Times Educational Supplement (4 July 1997): 7.

Calls The Sandy Bottom Orchestra, by Keillor and his wife Jenny Lind Nilsson, "a rewarding study of what it means to live in a small community as the gifted only child of arty, liberal, eccentric parents."

Cooper, Ilene. "It's Not as Easy as It Looks." Booklist 92, No. 19 (1 and 15 June 1996): 1732.

Asserts that authors of adult books often fail in their attempts at children's fiction, including Garrison Keillor in his The Old Man Who Loved Cheese.

Doan MacDougall, Ruth. Review of Lake Wobegon Days, by Garrison Keillor. The Christian Science Monitor 77 (6 September 1985): B4.

Praises Keillor's Lake Wobegon Days.

Michelson, Bruce. "Keillor and Rolvaag and the Art of Telling the Truth." American Studies 30, No. 1 (Spring 1989): 21-34.

Argues that Keillor "is engaged in an old, paradoxical art which no ideology has ever stamped out or explained away, the expression of cultural truth through the telling of tales, and the transformation of American mythology as the surest way of keeping it alive."

Narveson, Robert D. "Catholic-Lutheran Interaction in Keillor's Lake Wobegon Days and Hassler's Grand Opening." In Exploring the Midwestern Literary Imagination, edited by Marcia Noe, pp. 180-91. Troy, New York: Whitston Publishing Co., 1993.

Discusses the representation of sectarian relations in Keillor's Lake Wobegon Days and Jon Hassler's Grand Opening, and the reality of Catholic-Lutheran relations in small midwestern towns.

Ostrem, William. "Nietzsche, Keillor and the Religious Heritage of Lake Wobegon." Midamerica 18 (1991): 115-23.

Analyzes the relationship between the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and Keillor's Lake Wobegon Days.

Parrinder, Patrick. "Last in the Funhouse." The London Review of Books 8, No. 7 (17 April 1986): 18-9.

Discusses the style of American fiction in the 1980s as seen in several novels, including Keillor's Lake Wobegon Days.

Sexton, David. "When Here is Nowhere." The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4327 (7 March 1986): 257.

States that, "Half memoir, half fiction, [Keillor's] Lake Wobegon Days is wholly a success."

Wilson, Gahan. "Cats and Their Discontents." The New York Times Book Review (21 May 1995): 20.

Discusses the Roaring Twenties mood of Keillor's Cat, You Better Come Home.