A treasury of contemporary Southern humor includes more than 150 stories, sketches, essays, poems, memoirs, and song lyrics from William Faulkner, Mark Twain, Zora Neal Hurston, Dave Barry, and other contributors

In this acerbic, eminently quotable book, humorist Roy Blount Jr. focuses on his own dueling loyalties across the great American divide. Scholarly, raunchy, biting, and affable, Blount takes on topics ranging from chicken fingers and yellow dog Democrats to Elvis's toes while sharing some experiences of his own: chatting with Ray Charles, meeting an Okefenokee alligator, imagining Faulkner's tennis game, and being swept up, sort of, in the filming of Nashville. His yarns, analyses, and flights of fancy transcend all standard shades of Red, Blue, and in between. Blount's sidesplitting, irreverent musings may not end our tacit Civil War at long last, but they do clarify, or aptly complicate, divisive delusions on both sides of the long–standing national rift. Long Time Leaving is a comic ode to American variety and a droll assault on complacency both North and South from one of the most definitive and esteemed humorists of our time.

An indispensible guide to southernness from revered humorist and unapologetic curmudgeon Roy Blount Jr. When a simple-talking, peanut-warehousing, grit-eating Southern Baptist Cracker got himself nominated for president of the United States in 1976, it set Roy Blount Jr. to thinking—about the South, about southerners, and about southernness. The result is a collection of savagely funny and insightful takes on redneck heaven, whiskey, blood, possums, and a great number of other things. Blount turns his gimlet eye on his Dixie home, and in the process, he clears up long-held misconceptions (and creates new ones) about the people who reside below the Mason-Dixon line. Crackers delivers classic Blount, whether you are a proud southerner or a clueless Yankee.

Our best-laid plans will yield to fate. And we will say, “We lived. We ate.” Roy Blount Jr. is one of America’s most cherished comic writers. He’s been compared to Mark Twain and James Thurber, and his books have been called everything from “a work of art” (Robert W. Creamer, The New York Times Book Review) to “a book to read till it falls apart” (Newsweek). Now, in Save Room for Pie, he applies his much-praised wit and charm to a rich and fundamental topic: food. As a lifelong eater, Blount always got along easy with food—he didn’t have to think, he just ate. But food doesn’t exist in a vacuum; there’s the global climate and the global economy to consider, not to mention Blount’s chronic sinusitis, which constricts his sense of smell, and consequently his taste buds. So while he’s always frowned on eating with an ulterior motive, times have changed. Save Room for Pie grapples with these and other food-related questions in Blount’s signature style. Here you’ll find lively meditations on everything from bacon froth to grapefruit, Kobe beef to biscuits. You’ll also find defenses of gizzards, mullet, okra, cane syrup, watermelon, and boiled peanuts; an imagined dialogue between Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; input from Louis Armstrong, Frederick Douglass, and Blaze Starr; and of course some shampooed possums and carjacking turkeys. In poems and songs, limericks and fake (or sometimes true) news stories, Blount talks about food in surprising and innovative ways, with all the wit and verve that prompted Garrison Keillor, in The Paris Review, to say: “Blount is the best. He can be literate, uncouth, and soulful all in one sentence.”

The famed humorist tackles motherhood, family ties, and the nature of being Southern and funny in this bittersweet memoir unlike any other.

The thinking person's funny guy. The new Mark Twain. This country's most important humorist. Roy Blount, Jr., fits all these epithets. Here is a new collection of laugh-out-loud pieces, featuring twelve of Roy's popular Spy magazine crossword puzzles.

Fresh-squeezed Lexicology, with Twists No man of letters savors the ABC's, or serves them up, like language-loving humorist Roy Blount Jr. His glossary, from adhominy to zizz, is hearty, full bodied, and out to please discriminating palates coarse and fine. In 2008, he celebrated the gists, tangs, and energies of letters and their combinations in Alphabet Juice, to wide acclaim. Now, Alphabetter Juice. Which is better. This book is for anyone—novice wordsmith, sensuous reader, or career grammarian—who loves to get physical with words. What is the universal sign of disgust, ew, doing in beautiful and cutie? Why is toadless, but not frogless, in the Oxford English Dictionary? How can the U. S. Supreme Court find relevance in gollywoddles? Might there be scientific evidence for the sonicky value of hunch? And why would someone not bother to spell correctly the very word he is trying to define on Urbandictionary.com? Digging into how locutions evolve, and work, or fail, Blount draws upon everything from The Tempest to The Wire. He takes us to Iceland, for salmon-watching with a "girl gillie," and to Georgian England, where a distinguished etymologist bites off more of a "giantess" than he can chew. Jimmy Stewart appears, in connection with kludge and the bombing of Switzerland. Litigation over supercalifragilisticexpialidocious leads to a vintage werewolf movie; news of possum-tossing, to metanarrative. As Michael Dirda wrote in The Washington Post Book World, "The immensely likeable Blount clearly possesses what was called in the Italian Renaissance ‘sprezzatura,' that rare and enviable ability to do even the most difficult things without breaking a sweat." Alphabetter Juice is brimming with sprezzatura. Have a taste.

A hilarious exploration of male-female communication and other momentous topics Men don’t tell women things for various reasons. 1. The things in question may not be true.2. It is better to keep one’s mouth shut and be thought a pig than to open it and oink.3. There is a certain pleasure in holding certain considerations close to the chest.4. When there is a topic that might complicate a situation in which a woman is pleased for a man to hold her close to his chest, a man does not want to mess with it.5. It is hard to be manly while making pained moaning sounds.6. Men, whether or not they have the Right Stuff, have never quite gotten a secure grip on the concept of the Wrong Thing. The more Roy Blount Jr. thought about what men don’t tell women, the more he began to realize that nearly all of his writing involved things people don’t tell people. Things the sick don’t tell the well, things southerners don’t tell northerners, things authors don’t tell readers, things all too few of us tell anyone at all. But especially the things men don’t tell women. This riotous collection of classic Blount humor is chock full of those gender trade secrets—and plenty of yodeling too.

Now celebrating its fortieth anniversary, Roy Blount Jr.’s classic account of the 1973 Pittsburgh Steelers—a team on the cusp of once-in-a-generation greatness The Pittsburgh Steelers of the 1970s are mentioned in any conversation about the greatest dynasties in NFL history. A year before Pittsburgh’s first Super Bowl victory launched a decade of domination, Roy Blount Jr. spent a season traveling with the team, recording the ups and downs, both large and small, in the lives of men who would soon reach the pinnacle of success in their sport. He covers everything from the birth of the “Steel Curtain” defense to the unique connection the people of Pittsburgh had with their hard-nosed team. Interspersed with vivid depictions of players like Terry Bradshaw, “Mean” Joe Greene, and Ernie “Fats” Holmes, as well as the team owners, the Rooney clan, About Three Bricks Shy of a Load harks back to a bygone era when offensive linemen could weigh about the same as the backs they blocked for, when the highest-paying team’s highest-paid player—Bradshaw—made $400,000, and when one team was able to win four Super Bowls in six years—a feat that remains unrivaled today. Uproariously funny and brilliantly written, About Three Bricks Shy of a Load was named one of the Top 100 Sports Books of All Time by Sports Illustrated.