<div>Now celebrating its fortieth anniversary, Roy Blount Jr.&rsquo;s classic account of the 1973 Pittsburgh Steelers&mdash;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;Steel Curtain&rdquo; defense to the unique connection the people of Pittsburgh had with their hard-nosed team. Interspersed with vivid depictions of players like Terry Bradshaw, &ldquo;Mean&rdquo; Joe Greene, and Ernie &ldquo;Fats&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s highest-paid player&mdash;Bradshaw&mdash;made $400,000, and when one team was able to win four Super Bowls in six years&mdash;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. </div>

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About Three Bricks Shy of a Load

<div>A collection of short pieces about everything from genius and God to socks and lentils, from one of America&rsquo;s most beloved humor writers One Fell Soup brings together the reviews, diatribes, investigations, meditations, and poetry of Roy Blount Jr., a writer as insightful as he is funny. Culled from his many columns and magazine writings, this volume offers an unparalleled look at the varied interests of a writer the New York Times has compared to Mark Twain&mdash;albeit with a far greater demonstrated interest in love songs about gravy, ice cream, and mac and cheese. &ldquo;Chickens&rdquo; celebrates the vast cultural importance&mdash;and criminal neglect&mdash;of the most abundant domesticated fowl. &ldquo;So This Is Male Sexuality&rdquo; examines the unsettling specter of sex researchers like Masters and Johnson looming over one&rsquo;s private thoughts. And &ldquo;Merely Shot in the Head&rdquo; ponders the absurd willpower of a man who finishes a full marathon after taking a bullet ten miles into the race.</div>

One Fell Soup

<div>A funny novel of the first &ldquo;First Husband,&rdquo; from an author who &ldquo;writes in the grand tradition of such American humorists as Mark Twain and Will Rogers&rdquo; (Library Journal). Guy Fox first encountered Clementine on the campus of Dingler College. She was running, stark naked, away from an on-campus protest and the police who were pursuing her. Guy and Clementine&rsquo;s romance wound through turbulent social movements of the &rsquo;60s and &rsquo;70s, all the way to Clementine&rsquo;s ascension to the Oval Office. As the nation&rsquo;s very first First Husband, Guy is privy to the surreal intricacies of presidential life, and he sets out to write a light and thoroughly uncontroversial memoir about his relationship with Clementine. But the First Hubby can&rsquo;t help but let some of his more mischievous qualities slip through into his book . . . The thoroughly charming First Hubby is an engrossing novel about politics, family, and the art of marriage that &ldquo;offers an emphatic and romantic &lsquo;yes&rsquo; to the question &lsquo;Can true love survive the Oval Office&rsquo;?&rdquo; (The New Yorker). </div>

First Hubby

<div>A funny and incisive collection of essays on oddities of life in the 1980s, from one of America&rsquo;s most cherished humorists First published in 1985, Not Exactly What I Had In Mind is Roy Blount Jr.&rsquo;s smart and witty examination of the era&rsquo;s most glaring absurdities&mdash;from the ever-growing deficit under then-president Reagan to the Game Theory&ndash;like levels of strategy required to pack for a vacation. In &ldquo;Testimonial, Head-on,&rdquo; Blount offers a loving ode to the virtues of full-bodied beer. In &ldquo;Who You Gonna Call?&rdquo; he enumerates the indefatigable charms of Bill Murray. And in &ldquo;What You Personally Can Do about the Federal Deficit,&rdquo; he proposes a brilliantly simple and populist way to reduce government debt&mdash;and probably make your neighborhood post office very happy in the process. Powered by Roy Blount&rsquo;s irresistible sense of humor, Not Exactly What I Had in Mind revels in Reagan-era topics, but with a humor that is truly timeless.</div>

Not Exactly What I Had in Mind

<div>An eclectic collection from Roy Blount Jr., master of American humor writing I&rsquo;ll tell you what kind of book I believe in: one that makes people say, at first sight, what the first person who ever saw a camel must have said: &ldquo;What in the world is that?&rdquo; And then, after a while, &ldquo;Yet it seems to fit together some way.&rdquo; In this laugh-a-minute assortment of essays, travel writing, poems, and even the occasional crossword puzzle, Roy Blount Jr. covers sixty-four different subjects, all unified by his trademark humor. &ldquo;Tan&rdquo; is a personal essay about Blount&rsquo;s lifelong battle with&mdash;sometimes for and sometimes against&mdash;that elusive summer glow. &ldquo;Wild Fish Ripped My Flesh&rdquo; chronicles his misadventures navigating the Amazon River. And &ldquo;Lit Demystified Quickly&rdquo; is a tongue-in-cheek poem about larger-than-life literary figures such as James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Walt Whitman. Camels Are Easy, Comedy&rsquo;s Hard is a classic compendium of the wisecracks and wisdom for which Blount is renowned.</div>

Camels Are Easy, Comedy's Hard

<div>A hilarious exploration of male-female communication and other momentous topics Men don&rsquo;t tell women things for various reasons. 1. The things in question may not be true.2. It is better to keep one&rsquo;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&rsquo;t tell women, the more he began to realize that nearly all of his writing involved things people don&rsquo;t tell people. Things the sick don&rsquo;t tell the well, things southerners don&rsquo;t tell northerners, things authors don&rsquo;t tell readers, things all too few of us tell anyone at all. But especially the things men don&rsquo;t tell women. This riotous collection of classic Blount humor is chock full of those gender trade secrets&mdash;and plenty of yodeling too.</div>

What Men Don't Tell Women

<div>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&mdash;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.</div>

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Crackers

<div>Laugh-out-loud observations from &ldquo;America&rsquo;s foremost humorist&rdquo; (Chicago Tribune). What Men Don&rsquo;t Tell Women: Well, that&rsquo;s just for starters. Roy Blount Jr. realized that nearly all of his writing involved things people don&rsquo;t tell people: what Southerners don&rsquo;t tell Northerners, what the sick don&rsquo;t want to hear from the well, what no one would ever tell their mother, and what authors rarely admit to their readers. That all changes in this &ldquo;honest . . . funny&rdquo; collection of confessional essays about sex, friendship, marriage, male bonding, female patience, and Elvis (The Boston Globe). One Fell Soup: A deliciously funny stew of reviews, diatribes, investigations, meditations, assorted grumblings, and verse about the absurdities of American life, death, fears, and ambition. Included in these fifty-nine easy pieces: the truth (as Blount sees it) about nudism, cricket-fighting, bowling, macaroni and cheese, black holes and black socks, nuclear holocausts, the CIA, domesticated fowl, pork bellies, God, and more. The whole shebang from &ldquo;one of the most clever (see sly, witty, cunning, nimble) wordsmiths cavorting in the English language&rdquo; (Carl Hiaasen). Camels Are Easy, Comedy&rsquo;s Hard: Flesh-eating piranha! Synchronized swimming! Rubber chickens! Edith Wharton! Crossword puzzles! All and then some in this giddy compendium of essays, celebrity profiles, silly games, and side trips. Parts sports journalism, literary criticism, travel writing, and aborted novel, tossed with a few poems and a neo-Biblical one-act play, this is an uproarious&mdash;and sometimes heartening&mdash;anthology of adventures from &ldquo;one writer who never fails to please&rdquo; (The Village Voice).</div>

Dispatches Volume One

<div>&ldquo;This compulsively readable personal history . . . gathers the recollections of fans, writers, musicians, and artists&rdquo; about the enduring impact of The Beatles (Publishers Weekly). The arrival of the Beatles in America was an unforgettable cultural touchstone. Through the voices of those who witnessed it or were swept up in it indirectly, The Beatles Are Here! explores the emotional impact&mdash;some might call it hysteria&mdash;of the Fab Four&rsquo;s February 1964 dramatic landing on our shores. Contributors, including Lisa See, Gay Talese, Ren&eacute;e Fleming, Roy Blount, Jr., Greil Marcus, and many others, describe in essays and interviews how they were inspired by the Beatles. This intimate and entertaining collection arose from writer Penelope Rowlands&rsquo;s own Beatlemaniac phase: she was one of the screaming girls captured in an iconic photograph that has since been published around the world&mdash;and is displayed on the cover of this book. The stories of these girls, who found each other again almost fifty years later, are part of this volume as well. The Beatles Are Here! gets to the heart of why, half a century later, the Beatles still matter to us so deeply.</div>

Roy Blount Jr.

Books By Roy Blount Jr. (8 Books)

About Three Bricks Shy of a Load

One Fell Soup

First Hubby

Not Exactly What I Had in Mind

Camels Are Easy, Comedy's Hard

What Men Don't Tell Women

Crackers

Dispatches Volume One

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