Books by Rich Hall

Comic genius Rich Hall introduces a series of magnificent bastards and lost souls in this hilarious collection of tall tales. Meet the man who vacuums bewildered prairie dogs out of their burrows; a frustrated werewolf who roams the streets of Soho getting mistaken for Brian Blessed; a smug carbon-neutral eco-couple; a teenage girl who invites 45,000 MySpace friends to a house party; the author of a business book entitled Highly Successful Secrets to Standing on a Corner Holding Up a Golf Sale Sign and a man whose attempts to teach softball to a group of indolent British advertising executives sparks an international crisis.

The memoir of Otis Lee Crenshaw, Rich Hall's Perrier Award-winning alter ego'My Old Man's name was Jack Daniels Crenshaw. No surprise what he liked to drink. As a very small child I remember teething - cryin' out savagely for relief. Eventually he would appear over my crib and rub Jack Daniels on his gums until he fell asleep.' Married six times, all to women named Brenda, Otis Lee Crenshaw's bourbon-fuelled odyssey takes him from the high mountains of East Tennessee to the bottom of the music charts. A man not above faking his own death to sell more records, this is his not quite true story of romance, recidivism, country music, and an unshakeable belief in Marriage at First Sight.

I stopped off at the Peace Gardens - a memorial straddling the US-Canadian border commemorating 'Lasting Peace Between America and Canada', as if there had ever been a problem. Show me a garden commemorating Peace Between America and, say, Iraq and I'll be impressed. America is like a beauty contestant. It's gorgeous, until it opens its mouth.'From the similarities between US gun laws and British drinking hours, to what cryptic crosswords really tell us about the British psyche, American in London Rich Hall casts a keen eye on the lunatic contradictions and weird marvels of his native and adoptive homelands.'Full of acute left-field reflections on America and Americans, plus some marvellously irreverent sketches ...wise, witty and strangely true' GUARDIAN