books in order

Calvin Trillin Books In Order

Novels

  1. Runestruck (1977)
  2. Floater (1980)
  3. Tepper Isn’t Going Out (2002)

Collections

  1. Barnett Frummer (1969)

Non fiction series

  1. American Fried (1974)
  2. Alice, Let’s Eat (1978)
  3. Third Helpings (1983)
  4. The Tummy Trilogy (1994)

Non fiction

  1. An Education in Georgia (1964)
  2. U. S. Journal (1971)
  3. Uncivil Liberties (1982)
  4. Killings (1984)
  5. With All Disrespect (1985)
  6. If You Can’t Say Something Nice (1987)
  7. Travels with Alice (1989)
  8. Enough’s Enough (1990)
  9. American Stories (1991)
  10. Remembering Denny (1993)
  11. Deadline Poet (1995)
  12. Too Soon to Tell (1995)
  13. Piece By Piece (1996)
  14. Messages from My Father (1997)
  15. The Family Man (1998)
  16. Feeding a Yen (2003)
  17. About Alice (2006)
  18. Trillin on Texas (2011)
  19. Eating with the Pilgrims and Other Pieces (2011)
  20. Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin (2011)
  21. Jackson, 1964 (2016)
  22. Thalia Book Club (2017)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Non fiction series Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Calvin Trillin Books Overview

Floater

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.

Alice, Let’s Eat

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

The Tummy Trilogy

In the 1970s, Calvin Trillin informed America that its most glorious food was not to be found at the pretentious restaurants he referred to generically as La Maison de la Casa House, Continental Cuisine. With three hilarious books over the next two decades American Fried; Alice, Let’s Eat; and Third Helpings he established himself as, in Craig Claiborne s phrase, the Walt Whitman of American eats. Trillin s three comic masterpieces are now available in what Trillin calls The Tummy Trilogy.

An Education in Georgia

In January 1961, following eighteen months of litigation that culminated in a federal court order, Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter became the first black students to enter the University of Georgia. Calvin Trillin, then a reporter for Time Magazine, attended the court fight that led to the admission of Holmes and Hunter and covered their first week at the university a week that began in relative calm, moved on to a riot and the suspension of the two students ‘for their own safety,’ and ended with both returning to the campus under a new court order. Shortly before their graduation in 1963, Trillin came back to Georgia to determine what their college lives had been like. He interviewed not only Holmes and Hunter but also their families, friends, and fellow students, professors, and university administrators. The result was this book a sharply detailed portrait of how these two young people faced coldness, hostility, and occasional understanding on a southern campus in the midst of a great social change.

Travels with Alice

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 Elys es 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.

Remembering Denny

A reissue of Calvin Trillin’s memoir of his relationship with a brilliant but tragic Yale classmate that is also a rumination on social change in the 1950s and 1960sRemembering Denny is perhaps Calvin Trillin’s most inspired and powerful book: a memoir of a friendship, a work of investigative reporting, and an exploration of a country and a time that captures something essential about how America has changed since Trillin and Denny Hansen were graduated from Yale in 1957. Roger ‘Denny’ Hansen had seemed then a college hero for the ages: a charmer with a dazzling smile, the subject of a feature in Life magazine, a member of Phi Beta Kappa, a varsity swimmer, a Rhodes scholar…
perhaps a future president, as his friends only half joked. But after early jobs in government and journalism, Hansen’s life increasingly took a downward turn and he gradually lost touch with family and old friends before eventually committing suicide an obscure, embittered, pain racked professor in 1991. In contemplating his friend’s life, Calvin Trillin considers questions both large and small what part does the pressure of high expectations place on even the most gifted, how difficult might it have been to be a closeted homosexual in the unyielding world of the 1960s Foreign Service, how much responsibility does the individual bear for all that happens in his life in a book that is also a meditation on our country’s evolving sense of itself.

Deadline Poet

The popular syndicated columnist offers a collection of droll verse dealing with diverse subjects ranging from Saddam Hussein to the Philadelphia Phillies, along with essays about his development as a poet inspired by an impatient muse. National NYT.

Too Soon to Tell

A collection of topical essays revealing the acclaimed writer at his wittiest deals with matters of the family, educational issues, world affairs, and language in short takes that offer a humorous look at the quirks of society.Tour.

Piece By Piece

Calvin Trillin, who has something witty and insightful to say about any topic, has distinguished himself in fields of writing that are remarkably diverse. For thirty years, he has reported on the American scene for The New Yorker. His memoir of the fifties, Remembering Denny, was a New York Times bestseller. But he is perhaps best known for his humor in his syndicated newspaper column, in the ‘Shouts and Murmurs’ section of The New Yorker, in his antic adventures as a ‘happy cater,’ in the weekly appearances with Johnny Carson and David Letterman. This original recording his first features Trillin at his most uproarious, reading from his own articles and books. Wonderfully funny and full of surprises, this is a thoroughly satisfying, eminently entertaining, and beautifully crafted collection.

Messages from My Father

Calvin Trillin, the celebrated New Yorker writer, offers a rich and engaging biography of his father, as well as a literate and entertaining fanfare for the common and decent, and hard working man. 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 is Russia. In Kansas City, he was a grocer, at least until he swore off the grocery business. 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, such as ‘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. The author’s unerring sense of the American character is everywhere apparent in this quietly powerful memoir.

The Family Man

Calvin Trillin begins his wise and charming ruminations on family by stating the sum total of his child rearing advice: ‘Try to get one that doesn’t spit up. Otherwise, you’re on your own.’ Suspicious of any child rearing theories beyond ‘Your children are either the center of your life or they’re not,’ Trillin has clearly reveled in the role of family man. Acknowledging the special perils to the privacy of people living with a writer who occasionally remarks, ‘I hope you’re not under the impression that what you just said was off the record,’ Trillin deals with the subject of family in a way that is loving, honest, and wildly funny.

Feeding a Yen

Calvin Trillin has never been a champion of the continental cuisine palaces he used to refer to as La Maison de la Casa House nor of their successors, the trendy spots he calls sleepy time restaurants, where everything is served on a bed of something else. What he treasures is the superb local specialty. And he will go anywhere to find one. As it happens, some of Trillin’s favorite dishes pimientos de Padr n in northern Spain, for instance, or pan bagnat in Nice or posole in New Mexico can t be found anywhere but in their place of origin. Those dishes are on his Register of Frustration and Deprivation. On gray afternoons, I go over it, he writes, like a miser who is both tantalizing and tormenting himself by poring over a list of people who owe him money. On brighter afternoons, he calls his travel agent. Trillin shares charming and funny tales of managing to have another go at, say, fried marlin in Barbados or the barbecue of his boyhood in Kansas City. Sometimes he returns with yet another listing for his Register as when he travels to Ecuador for ceviche, only to encounter fanesca, a soup so difficult to make that it should appear on an absolutely accurate menu as Potage Labor Intensive. We join the hunt for the authentic fish taco. We tag along on the boudin blitzkrieg in the part of Louisiana where people are accustomed to buying boudin and polishing it off in the parking lot or in their cars Cajun boudin not only doesn t get outside the state, it usually doesn t even get home . In New York, we follow Trillin as he roams Queens with the sort of people who argue about where to find the finest Albanian burek and as he tries to use a glorious local specialty, the New York bagel, to lure his daughters back from California I understand that in some places out there if you buy a dozen wheat germ bagels you get your choice of a bee pollen bagel or a ginseng bagel free . Feeding a Yen is a delightful reminder of why New York magazine called Calvin Trillin our funniest food writer.

About Alice

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.

Trillin on Texas

‘Yes, I do have a Texas connection, but, as we say in the Midwest, where I grew up, not so’s you’d know it.’ So Calvin Trillin introduces this collection of articles and poems about a place that turns up surprisingly often when he’s ostensibly writing about something else. Whether reporting on the American scene for the New Yorker, penning comic verse and political commentary for the Nation, or writing his memoirs, Trillin has bumped into Texas again and again. He insists that ‘this has not been by design…
there has simply been a lot going on in Texas.’ Astute readers will note, however, that Trillin’s family immigrated to the United States through the port of Galveston, and, after reading this book, many will believe that the Lone Star State has somehow imprinted itself in the family’s imagination. Trillin on Texas gathers some of Trillin’s best writing on subjects near to his heart politics, true crime, food, and rare books, among them which also have a Texas connection. Indulging his penchant for making ‘snide and underhanded jokes about respectable public officials,’ he offers his signature sardonic take on the Bush dynasty and their tendency toward fractured syntax; a faux, but quite believable, LBJ speech; and wry portraits of assorted Texas county judges, small town sheriffs, and Houston immigration lawyers. Trillin takes us on a mouthwatering pilgrimage to the barbecue joint that Texas Monthly proclaimed the best in Texas and describes scouting for books with Larry McMurtry who rejects all of his ‘sleepers.’ He tells the stories of two teenagers who dug up half a million dollars in an ice chest on a South Texas ranch and of rare book dealer Johnny Jenkins, who was found floating in the Colorado River with a bullet wound in the back of his head. And he recounts how redneck movie reviewer ‘Joe Bob Briggs’ fueled a war between Dallas’s daily newspapers and pays tribute to two courageous Texas women who spoke truth to power Molly Ivins and Sissy Farenthold. Sure to entertain Texans and other folks alike, Trillin on Texas proves once again that Calvin Trillin is one of America’s shrewdest observers and wittiest writers.

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