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One Fell Soup: Or I'm Just a Bug on the Windshield of Life

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A collection of satire, fiction, criticism, invective, reflection, reporting, and verse focuses on such topics as Ronald Reagan, black holes, male sexuality, pigs, television, economics, bowling, and chickens

280 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

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About the author

Roy Blount Jr.

71 books66 followers
Roy Blount Jr. is the author of twenty-three books. The first, About Three Bricks Shy of a Load, was expanded into About Three Bricks Shy . . . and the Load Filled Up. It is often called one of the best sports books of all time. His subsequent works have taken on a range of subjects, from Duck Soup, to Robert E. Lee, to what cats are thinking, to how to savor New Orleans, to what it’s like being married to the first woman president of the United States.

Blount is a panelist on NPR’s Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!, an ex-president of the Authors Guild, a usage consultant for the American Heritage Dictionary, a New York Public Library Literary Lion, and a member of both the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the band the Rock Bottom Remainders.

In 2009, Blount received the University of North Carolina’s Thomas Wolfe Prize. The university cited “his voracious appetite for the way words sound and for what they really mean.” Time places Blount “in the tradition of the great curmudgeons like H. L. Mencken and W. C. Fields.” Norman Mailer has said, “Page for page, Roy Blount is as funny as anyone I’ve read in a long time.” Garrison Keillor told the Paris Review, “Blount is the best. He can be literate, uncouth, and soulful all in one sentence.”

Blount’s essays, articles, stories, and verses have appeared in over one hundred and fifty publications, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, Esquire, the Atlantic, Sports Illustrated, the Oxford American, and Garden & Gun. He comes from Decatur, Georgia, and lives in western Massachusetts.

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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
659 reviews2 followers
January 31, 2025
What has changed? It can't be this book Roy Blount Jr. wrote sometime in the eighties. It used to be funny. Now, I find it barely readable with an amusing observation here and there. The poems are so silly or scatological that I don't want to read them. What has happened? I grow old...I grow old...I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
3 reviews
October 28, 2020
Meh.

Not that funny. And not one of Mr. Booker's "songs" have a tune or any sense of rhythm. Call them what the are: poems. Or doggeral. There are a few funny bits in here, but it isn't worth your time to wade through the book to find them.
2 reviews
September 7, 2021
Roy Blount Jr. has some lines in here that made me laugh so hard I could barely breathe, and then remembering them I laughed almost as hard. Comedy's hard but every now and then Blount Jr. hits one out of the park, and he does it with that easy relaxed swing he has.
Profile Image for Brent.
2,251 reviews195 followers
May 14, 2015
I heard Blount read this essay and series of country song lyrics aloud at Clemson University in midsummer 1982 or 1983.
Highly recommended.
Profile Image for Chris "Stu".
281 reviews9 followers
December 22, 2016
Manic, forced, and unfunny. Or at least very much not my cup of tea.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews

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