Garrison Keillor, the NPR humorist best known for his tall tales of Lake Wobegon, published a new book earlier this month, and member Larry Randen reports that John Updike is prominently mentioned in the introduction of The Keillor Reader:

“I think often of John Updike, who lovingly re-created the backyards and clotheslines of the 1940s small town and described a snowstorm as ‘an immense whispering’ and wrote beautifully of his father bidding him goodbye on a train platform and astonishing him by planting a kiss on his cheek. I last saw John on the New York subway, riding from 155th Street down to 72nd, a white-haired gent of seventy-five grinning like a school kid. At 110th a gang of seminarians boarded and crowded around him, chattering, not recognizing him, and he sat soaking it up, delighted, surrounded by material” (xxxi).

Randen says that he and his wife, Lollie, went to hear Keillor read from his new book at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minn., and that Updike also was mentioned during a Q&A session.

According to Randen, “The first question was: ‘Who is/was your favorite writer?’ Keillor said, ‘John Updike’ and offered a few sentences about how good Updike’s writing was and then added an anecdote about ‘The Last Time I Saw Updike a Couple Years Before His Death.’

“In his response to the first question he told the same account [as he included in the introduction] but added that ‘the seminarians were excitedly arguing about Karl Barth, a favorite neo-orthodox theologian who was also a favorite of Updike’s; the students had just come from a lecture about Barth and were caught up with discussing issues about Barth, pro and con, and hearing this pleased Updike to no end as he sat there anonymously soaking the moment up and smiling, perhaps, because another generation had discovered Barth.”

Here’s a link to the Amazon.com sell-page for The Keillor Reader, where you can “look inside” and see the table of contents and a sample chapter.