Calvin Trillin

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

New York

Forty Years of Funny Stuff

For at least forty years, Calvin Trillin has committed blatant acts of funniness all over the place--in The New Yorker, in one-man off-Broadway shows, in his "deadline poetry" for The Nation, in comic novels like Tepper Isn't Going Out, in books chronicling his adventures as a happy eater, and in the column USA Today called "simply the funniest regular column in journalism."

Now Trillin selects the best of his funny stuff and organizes it into topics like high finance ("My long-term investment strategy has been criticized as being entirely too dependent on Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes") and the literary life ("The average shelf life of a book is somewhere between milk and yogurt.")

In Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin, the author deals with such subjects as the horrors of witnessing a voodoo economics ceremony and the mystery of how his mother managed for thirty years to feed her family nothing but leftovers ("We have a team of anthropologists in there now looking for the original meal") and the true story behind the Shoe Bomber: "The one terrorist in England with a sense of humor, a man known as Khalid the Droll, had said to the cell, 'I bet I can get them all to take off their shoes in airports.' " He remembers Sarah Palin with a poem called "On a Clear Day, I See Vladivostok" and John Edwards with one called "Yes, I Know He's a Mill Worker's Son, but There's Hollywood in That Hair."

In this, the definitive collection of his humor, Calvin Trillin is prescient, insightful, and invariably hilarious.

Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin

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Comedic stories from a classic cartoonist formerly at The New Yorker magazine. Hilarious and side-splittingly funny, this book of classic cartoons is bound to make you burst out in laughter. Don't miss it! 

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

A very humorous and entertaining take on the President election of 2012, this book is rated a respectable 3.8 out of 5 on Goodreads. Written in witty verse form, this book is perfect for lovers of political satire

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Maryland

The 2012 Presidential Campaign in Verse

Presents a humorous ode to the 2012 presidential election that likens the campaign to a three-ring circus and includes riffs on figures ranging from Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich to Rick Perry and Rick Santorum.

Dogfight

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Louisiana

And Other Dispatches from Fifty Years of Reporting on Race in America

From bestselling author and beloved New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin, a deeply resonant, career-spanning collection of articles on race and racism, from the 1960s to the present

In the early sixties, Calvin Trillin got his start as a journalist covering the Civil Rights Movement in the South. Over the next five decades of reporting, he often returned to scenes of racial tension. Now, for the first time, the best of Trillin's pieces on race in America have been collected in one volume.

In the title essay of Jackson, 1964, we experience Trillin's riveting coverage of the pathbreaking voter registration drive known as the Mississippi Summer Project--coverage that includes an unforgettable airplane conversation between Martin Luther King, Jr., and a young white man sitting across the aisle. ("I'd like to be loved by everyone," King tells him, "but we can't always wait for love.")

In the years that follow, Trillin rides along with the National Guard units assigned to patrol black neighborhoods in Wilmington, Delaware; reports on the case of a black homeowner accused of manslaughter in the death of a white teenager in an overwhelmingly white Long Island suburb; and chronicles the remarkable fortunes of the Zulu Social Aid & Pleasure Club, a black carnival krewe in New Orleans whose members parade on Mardi Gras in blackface.

He takes on issues that are as relevant today as they were when he wrote about them. Excessive sentencing is examined in a 1970 piece about a black militant in Houston serving thirty years in prison for giving away one marijuana cigarette. The role of race in the use of deadly force by police is highlighted in a 1975 article about an African American shot by a white policeman in Seattle.

Uniting all these pieces are Trillin's unflinching eye and graceful prose. Jackson, 1964 is an indispensable account of a half-century of race and racism in America, through the lens of a master journalist and writer who was there to bear witness.

Praise for Jackson, 1964

"Trillin's elegant storytelling and keen observations sometimes churned my wrath about the glacial pace of progress. That's because to me and millions of African-Americans, the topics of race and poverty--and their adverse impact on the mind and spirit--are, as Trillin acknowledges, not theoretical; they're personal."--Dorothy Butler Gilliam, The New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice)

"These pieces . . . will continue to be read for the pleasure they deliver as well as for the pain they describe."--The New York Times

"With the diligent clarity, humane wit, polished prose and attention to pertinent detail that exemplify Trillin's journalism at its best . . . Jackson, 1964 drives home a sobering realization: Even with signs of progress, racism in America is news that stays news."--USA Today

"These unsettling tales, elegantly written and wonderfully reported, are like black-and-white snapshots from the national photo album. They depict a society in flux but also stubbornly unmoved through the decades when it comes to many aspects of race relations. . . . The grace Trillin brings to his job makes his stories all the more poignant."--The Christian Science Monitor

"An exceptional collection [from] master essayist Trillin."--Booklist (starred review)

Jackson, 1964

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Clean copy in very nice condition. One small remainder mark on bottom foredge. Prompt and carefully shipped!

North Carolina

Small scratch in cover (see pics); otherwise, like new. First edition, first printing.

Washington

Dispatches from a Life in the Press

A fascinating, opinionated portrait of journalism and the people who make it, told through pieces collected from the incomparable six-decade career of bestselling author and beloved New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin I’ve been writing about the press almost as long as I’ve been in the game. At some point, it occurred to me that disparate pieces from various places in various styles amounted to a picture from multiple angles of what the press has been like over the years since I became a practitioner and an observer. Calvin Trillin has reported serious pieces across America for The New Yorker, covered the Civil Rights movement in the South for Time, and written comic verse in The Nation. In all these forms, one of his favorite subjects over the years—a superb fit for Trillin’s unique combination of reportage and humor —has been his own professional environment: the American press. In The Lede, Trillin gathers his incisive, often hilarious writing on reporting, reporters, and the media world that is their orbit. He writes about a legendary crime reporter in Miami and about a swashbuckling New York Times reporter and about an erudite film critic in Dallas who once a week transformed himself from an appreciator of the French nouvelle vague to a teenage connoisseur of movies like Mother Riley Meets the Vampire. Plus pieces on the House of Lords dreams of a North American press baron, the paucity of gossip columns in Russia, the embroilment of a weekly newspaper in a missing person case, and the founding of a publication called Beautiful Spot: A Magazine of Parking. Uniting all of this is Trillin’s signature combination of empathy, humor, and graceful prose. The Lede is an invaluable portrait of one our fundamental American institutions from a master journalist.

The Lede (FIRST EDITION)

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Great readable condition. Book in great shape. Pages are perfect inside, no writing, no high lighting, no folds or wrinkles. 
Some brown speckles from the top view of the pages. Otherwise it’s really great. 

Pennsylvania

This delightful book collects Calvin Trillin's accounts of his trips to Europe with his wife, Alice, and their two daughters. In Taormina, Sicily, they cheerfully disagree with Mrs. Tweedie's 1904 assertion that the beautiful town "is being spoilt," and skip the Grand Tour in favor of swimming holes, table soccer, and taureaux piscine. In Paris, they spend a day on the Champs- Elysees comparing Freetime's "le Hitburger" to McDonald's Big Mac. In Spain, Trillin wonders whether he will run out of Spanish "the way someone might run out of flour or eggs." Filled with Trillin's characteristic humor, "Travels with Alice" is the perfect book for summer travelers.

Travels with Alice

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California

In Calvin Trillin’s antic tales of family life, she was portrayed as the wife who had “a weird predilection for limiting our family to three meals a day” and the mother who thought that if you didn’t go to every performance of your child’s school play, “the county would come and take the child.” Now, five years after her death, her husband offers this loving portrait of Alice Trillin off the page–his loving portrait of Alice Trillin off the page–an educator who was equally at home teaching at a university or a drug treatment center, a gifted writer, a stunningly beautiful and thoroughly engaged woman who, in the words of a friend, “managed to navigate the tricky waters between living a life you could be proud of and still delighting in the many things there are to take pleasure in.” Though it deals with devastating loss, About Alice is also a love story, chronicling a romance that began at a Manhattan party when Calvin Trillin desperately tried to impress a young woman who “seemed to glow.” “You have never again been as funny as you were that night,” Alice would say, twenty or thirty years later. “You mean I peaked in December of 1963?” “I’m afraid so.” But he never quit trying to impress her. In his writing, she was sometimes his subject and always his muse. The dedication of the first book he published after her death read, “I wrote this for Alice. Actually, I wrote everything for Alice.” In that spirit, Calvin Trillin has, with About Alice, created a gift to the wife he adored and to his readers.

About Alice

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Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Florida

True stories of sudden death in the classic collection by a master of American journalism “Reporters love murders,” Calvin Trillin writes in the introduction to Killings. “In a pinch, what the lawyers call ‘wrongful death’ will do, particularly if it’s sudden.” Killings, first published in 1984 and expanded for this edition, shows Trillin to be such a reporter, drawn time after time to tales of sudden death. But Trillin is attracted less by violence or police procedure than by the way the fabric of people’s lives is suddenly exposed when someone comes to an untimely end. As Trillin says, Killings is “more about how Americans live than about how some of them die.” These stories, which originally appeared in The New Yorker between 1969 and 2010, are vivid portraits of lives cut short. An upstanding farmer in Iowa finds himself drastically changed by a woman he meets in a cocktail lounge. An eccentric old man in Eastern Kentucky is enraged by the presence of a documentary filmmaker. Two women move to a bucolic Virginia county to find peace, only to end up at war over a shared road. Mexican American families in California hand down a feud from generation to generation. A high-living criminal-defense lawyer in Miami acquires any number of enemies capable of killing him. Stark and compassionate, deeply observed and beautifully written, Killings is “that rarity, reportage as art” (William Geist, The New York Times Book Review). Praise for Killings “Riveting tales of murder and mayhem. . . . [Calvin] Trillin is a superb writer, with a magical ability to turn even the most mundane detail into spellbinding wonder. Armed with this wealth of material, he utterly shines. Every piece here is a gem.”—The Seattle Times “What Mr. Trillin does so well, what makes Killings literature, is the way he pictures the lives that were interrupted by the murders. Even the most ordinary life makes a terrible noise . . . when it’s broken off.”—Anatole Broyard, The New York Times “Fascinating, troubling . . . In each of these stories is the basis of a Dostoevskian novel.”—Edward Abbey, Chicago Sun-Times “The stories . . . are unforgettable. They leave us, finally, with the awareness of the unknowable opacity of the human heart.”—Bruce Colman, San Francisco Chronicle “[Trillin] writes brilliantly. . . . These stories still hold up, as classics.”—The Buffalo News “In his artful ability to conjure up a whole life and a whole world, Trillin comes as close to achieving the power of a Chekhov short story as can anyone whose material is so implacably tied to fact.”—Frederick Iseman, Harper’s Bazaar “I have a book for you true-crime addicts if you’re caught up on the podcast Serial, the cascade on TV of 48 Hours and Dateline NBC episodes. . . . It’s time to pick up Calvin Trillin’s Killings.”—The New York Times Book Review “Well-crafted and thoughtfully composed, lacking judgment and admonishment, these are a true piece of quality journalism, which clearly continues to captivate audiences.”—Library Journal “With telling detail and shrewd insights, [Calvin Trillin] masterfully evokes the places and personalities that hatched these grim episodes.”—Publishers Weekly

Killings

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Minnesota

A Novel

Murray Tepper would say that he is an ordinary New Yorker who is simply trying to read the newspaper in peace. But he reads while sitting behind the wheel of his parked car, and his car always seems to be in a particularly desirable parking spot. Not surprisingly, he is regularly interrupted by drivers who want to know if he is going out. Tepper isn’t going out. Why not? His explanations tend to be rather literal: the indisputable fact, for instance, that he has twenty minutes left on the meter. Tepper’s behavior sometimes irritates the people who want his spot. (“Is that where you live? Is that car rent-controlled?”) It also irritates the mayor—Frank Ducavelli, known in tabloid headlines as Il Duce—who sees Murray Tepper as a harbinger of what His Honor always calls “the forces of disorder.” But once New Yorkers become aware of Tepper, some of them begin to suspect that he knows something they don’t know. And an ever-increasing number of them are willing to line up for the opportunity to sit in his car with him and find out. Tepper Isn’t Going Out is a wise and witty story of an ordinary man who, perhaps innocently, changes the world around him. BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Calvin Trillin's Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin.

Tepper Isn't Going Out

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Michigan

Virginia

Further Adventures of a Happy Eater

“Trillin is our funniest food writer. He writes with charm, freedom, and a rare respect for language.”
–New York magazine

In this delightful and delicious book, Calvin Trillin, guided by an insatiable appetite, embarks on a hilarious odyssey in search of “something decent to eat.” Across time zones and cultures, and often with his wife, Alice, at his side, Trillin shares his triumphs in the art of culinary discovery, including Dungeness crabs in California, barbecued mutton in Kentucky, potato latkes in London, blaff d’oursins in Martinique, and a $33 picnic on a no-frills flight to Miami. His eating companions include Fats Goldberg, the New York pizza baron and reformed blimp; William Edgett Smith, the man with the Naughahyde palate; and his six-year-old daughter, Sarah, who refuses to enter a Chinese restaurant unless she is carrying a bagel (“just in case”). And though Alice “has a weird predilection for limiting our family to three meals a day,” on the road she proves to be a serious eater–despite “seemingly uncontrollable attacks of moderation.” Alice, Let Eat amply demonstrates why The New Republic called Calvin Trillin “a classic American humorist.”

“One of the most brilliant humorists of our times . . . Trillin is guaranteed good reading.”
–Charleston Post and Courier

“Read Trillin and laugh out loud.”
–Time

Alice, Let's Eat

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A loving story about how someone deeply loved his Jewish father. 

A Memoir

The author reflects on the life of his father, an immigrant grocer in Kansas City with a penchant for swearing off his pleasures and encouraging his son to be a real "mensch."

Messages from My Father

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First Edition. #GeorgeWBush #President #gaffs #humor #bestselling-author #politics #Republicans #government #firstedition #calvintrillin


More of the Bush Administration in Rhyme

The humorist and author offers a new collection of irreverent verses that takes aim at the Bush administration.

A Heckuva Job (First Edition)

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"In this delightful and delicious book, Calvin Trillin, guided by an insatiable appetite, embarks on a hilarious odyssey in search of “something decent to eat.” Across time zones and cultures, and often with his wife, Alice, at his side." -- Amazon.com viewed August 7, 2020.

New Jersey

Uncivil Liberties

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Slightly creased inner part of dust jacket 

In these, "the sort of stories you might tell in front of a fire", Calvin Trillin brings together twelve funny, troubling, moving and always revealing narratives--extended pieces that have appeared in The New Yorker over the past seven years.

American Stories

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Nevada

Connecticut

Messages From My Father The man was stubborn, says Calvin Trillin -- the second most stubborn member of the Trillin family -- to begin his fond, wry and affecting memoir of his father. Abe Trillin had the western Missouri accent of someone who had grown up in St. Joseph and the dreams of America of someone who had been born in Russia. He was given to swearing off things -- coffee, tobacco, alcohol, all neckties that were not yellow in color. Presumably, he had also sworn off swearing, although he was a collector of curses like May you have an injury that is not covered by workman's compensation. Although he had a strong vision of the sort of person he wanted his son to be, his explicit advice about how to behave didn't go beyond an almost lackadaisical You might as well be a mensch. Somehow, though, Abe Trillin's messages got through clearly. Admirers of Calvin Trillin's unerring sense of the American character will be entertained and touched by this quietly powerful memoir.

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