| Product Summary | | Format: Hardcover | | ISBN: 9780316143479 | | Publisher: Little Brown and Company | | Publish Date: 6/3/2008 | | Buy.com Sku: 206730345 | | Item#: | | Buy.com Sales Rank: 65621 | | Dimensions (in Inches) 8.5H x 5.75L x 1T | | Pages: 288 |
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| | | Once again, David Sedaris brings together a collection of essays so uproariously funny and profoundly moving that his legions of fans will fall for him once more. He tests the limits of love when Hugh lances a boil from his backside, and pushes the boundaries of laziness when, finding the water shut off in his house in Normandy, he looks to the water in a vase of fresh cut flowers to fill the coffee machine. From armoring the windows with LP covers to protect the house from neurotic songbirds to the awkwardness of having a lozenge fall from your mouth into the lap of a sleeping fellow passenger on a plane, David Sedaris uses life's most bizarre moments to reach new heights in understanding love and fear, family and strangers. Culminating in a brilliantly funny account of his venture to Tokyo in order to quit smoking, David Sedaris's sixth essay collection will be avidly anticipated.
Annotation:
The arch and bemused essayist David Sedaris returns with another collection of humorous pieces that delight in the inanity of contemporary life. Topics for consideration include his family's horror at his depictions of them in his books, a randy tow-trucker driver, and his misadventures and misunderstandings in Paris, London, and Japan as he travels around with his lover Hugh. Though his tone is acidic to the point of cruelty, Sedaris' essays are at their finest when elements of desperate pathos and surprising sentimentality break through the witty veneer.
| Praise| "Older, wiser, smarter and meaner, Sedaris...defies the odds once again by delivering an intelligent take on the banalities of an absurd life....Just when Sedaris seems to have disappeared down the rabbit hole of ironic introspection, he delivers a cracking blow of insight that leaves you reeling." (starred review) 04/15/2008 |
| 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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