| Product Summary | | Format: Hardcover | | ISBN: 9780316777728 | | Publisher: Little Brown and Company | | Publish Date: 5/1/2000 | | Buy.com Sku: 30570657 | | Item#: RLM5CF | | Dimensions (in Inches) 8.75H x 6L x 0.5T | | Pages: 224 |
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| | | | A new collection from David Sedaris is cause for jubilation. His recent move to Paris has inspired hilarious pieces, including "Me Talk Pretty One Day, " about his attempts to learn French.
From the Publisher
A new collection from David Sedaris is cause for jubilation. His recent move to Paris has inspired hilarious pieces, including "Me Talk Pretty One Day, " about his attempts to learn French. His family is another inspiration. "You Can't Kill the Rooster" is a portrait of his brother who talks incessant hiphop slang to his bewildered father. And no one hones a finer fury in response to such modern annoyances as restaurant meals presented in ludicrous towers and cashiers with 6-inch fingernails. Compared by The New Yorker to Twain and Hawthorne, Sedaris has become one of our best-loved authors.
-- And he's an NPR star. Sedaris's commentaries and observations are featured regularly on NPR, and he remains a top correspondent for Ira Glass's series "This American Life."
-- Sedaris is an amazing reader whose appearances draw hundreds, and his performances -- including a jaw-dropping impression of Billie Holiday singing "I wish I were an Oscar Meyer weiner" -- are unforgettable.
-- Sedaris's essays on living in Paris are some of the funniest he's ever written. At last, someone even meaner than the French!
Annotation:
David Sedaris, author of NAKED, continues his humorous exploration of himself, focusing on his humorous attempts to learn French after moving to Paris; his topics include restaurants, his quirky dislikes, his career dreams, and the habits of his increasingly eccentric family.
| PraiseNew York Times
"[I]f Mr. Sedaris sometimes sounds as though he were making do with leftover material, TALK PRETTY still makes for diverting reading. At the same time this volume shows Mr. Sedaris intermittently trying to step out of his role as curmudgeonly complainer. Though he still whips off the tart put-down with practiced ease...[H]e also shows himself capable, in these pages, of something approaching empathy and introspection....[T]he stronger chapters in this book tend to be the ones that mix satire with sentiment, brazenness with rumination. Those pieces reveal a writer who is capable not only of being funny, but touching, even tender, too." - Michiko Kakutani 06/16/2000New York Times
"Many lines and several of the premises are brilliant, worthy of our best comic essayists [but the] gifted Sedaris has not been hard enough on himself. At the risk of sounding patronizing, I suspect there is a better writer in there than he is as yet willing to let out." - Jonathan Reynolds 06/04/2000 Book
"The book is laugh-out-loud funny, witty, trenchant and over far too soon." - Chris Barsanti July/August 2000 Boston Book Review
"The joy of each piece is in the reading itself?.Each essay is a delight, and explores the different worlds of family, city, and foreign countries in a consistent voice and rhythm. Some are definitely stronger than others. Some, in fact, are among the best things Sedaris has written?but others come off as comparatively weak." July/August 2000 |
| Author Bio| David Sedaris | Growing up in southern New York State, Sedaris was raised in a
close-knit Greek-American family with five siblings. While in elementary school, his family moved to Raleigh, North Carolina when his father, an IBM engineer, was transferred. During his childhood, he suffered from obsessive-compulsive tendencies that later subsided like incessant counting and systematically touching objects on his path, while consoling himself with rocking. Sedaris also became aware at any early age that he was homosexual, but adamantly denied it and joined his peers in homophobic taunts. After high school, he enrolled in Kent State University, but dropped out shortly thereafter, hitchhiked cross-country, and started the series of menial jobs that he eventually documented in his much-lauded essays. Although he didn't read much as a child, he started keeping a diary during this hitchhiking stint and caught up on classics and contemporary fiction. He moved to Chicago at age 27 to attend the Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied painting and taught writing courses, eventually graduating in 1987. Although National Public Radio's Ira Glass discovered him entertaining audiences in a Chicago club with selections from his diary, he didn't start contributing to NPR until after he moved to New York in 1991. His writing career took off when he chronicled his experiences working as a Macy's elf in "Santaland Diaries," which aired originally on NPR's Morning Edition in 1992. He eventually left his apartment-cleaning job to concentrate on writing full-time, but continues to write about the numerous other jobs he held since high school: state mental hospital volunteer, apple picker, mover, and office worker. Sedaris doesn't own a computer and wrote with a manual typewriter until he received an electric model as a Christmas present at 32. Aside from other quirks like his taxidermy collection, Sedaris is known for a distinctive high-pitched voice he detests and conversational writing that is satirical, humorous, poignant, and slightly twisted. He was closer to his mother--a tough-talking, hard-drinking, incessant-smoking housewife--than his father. She died of lung cancer while continuing to smoke, and Sedaris smokes two packs a day and wrote an essay mocking militant, air-preserving nonsmokers. Although he is credited as one of the first openly homosexual contributors to NPR that isn't issue-oriented, Sedaris insists on merging his homosexuality naturally within the larger context of his work instead of becoming an outspoken advocate for gay issues. Sedaris continues to write short stories, "true enough" essays, and plays, the latter collaborations with his sister, actor and playwright Amy Sedaris, under the name of the Talent Family. |
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