LEAVING HOME <i> by Garrison Keillor (Penguin Books: $4.95) </i>

Penguin Books has here collected 36 of the host of “A Prairie Home Companion’s” radio monologues, each beginning with the words “it has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon”--a town “where all the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”

Those who have been charmed by Keillor’s wistful American pastoral will be pleased to learn, as Dan Sullivan put it in his review, that “Keillor doesn’t ramble as much in type as he did on the air. Something else does come across better on the page: the realization that Lake Wobegon does not exist. . . . Every now and then, the whole town starts to waver, like a mirage, and you see Keillor . . . wondering whether to send a character into her house to discover the mess that her kids have made, or to let her take a walk around the block first.”