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New York Times Best Seller "David Sedaris's ability to transform the mortification of everyday life into wildly entertaining art" (The Christian Science Monitor) is elevated to wilder and more entertaining heights than ever in this remarkable new book. Trying to make coffee when the water is shut off, David considers using the water in a vase of flowers and his chain of associations takes him from the French countryside to a hilariously uncomfortable memory of buying drugs in a mobile home in rural North Carolina. In essay after essay, Sedaris proceeds from bizarre conundrums of daily life-having a lozenge fall from your mouth into the lap of a fellow passenger on a plane or armoring the windows with LP covers to protect the house from neurotic songbirds-to the most deeply resonant human truths. Culminating in a brilliant account of his venture to Tokyo in order to quit smoking, David Sedaris's sixth essay collection is a new masterpiece of comic writing from "a writer worth treasuring" (Seattle Times).
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Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules From the #1 bestselling author of Me Talk Pretty One Day and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim comes a collection of the short stories David Sedaris loves most. Containing the work of both contemporary and classic writers, Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules, edited and introduced by Sedaris, gives his legions of fans a glimpse at the writing he finds inspiring - and helps them discover the truth abut loneliness, hope, love, betrayal, and certain, but not all, monkeys. David Sedaris fell in love with short stories while living in Odell, Oregon. Sedaris writes, ""When apple-picking season ended, I got a job in a packing plant and gravitated toward short stories, which I could read during my break and reflect upon for the remainder of my shift. A good one would take me out of myself and stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit."" Featuring such notable writers as Alice Munro, Tobias Wolff, Lorrie Moore, and Joyce Carol Oates, readers will reconnect with classics, as well discover fantastic but lesser-known writers. Included in Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules are: Introduction by David Sedaris, "Oh, Joseph, I'm So Tired" by Richard Yates, "Gryphon" by Charles Baxter, "Interpreter of Maladies" by Jhumpa Lahiri, "The Garden Party" by Katherine Mansfield, "Half A Grapefruit" by Alice Munro, "Applause, Applause" by Jean Thompson, "I Know What I'm Doing About All the Attention I've Been Getting" by Frank Gannon , "Where the Door Is Always Open and the Welcome Mat Is Out" by Patricia Highsmith, "The Best of Betty" by Jincy Willett, "Song of the Shirt, 1941" by Dorothy Parker, "The Girl with the Blackened Eye" by Joyce Carol Oates, "People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk" by Lorrie Moore, "Revelation" by Flannery O'Connor, "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried" by Amy Hempel, "Cosmopolitan" by Akhil Sharma, "Irish Girl" by Tim Johnston, "Bullet in the Brain" by Tobias Wolff, and Epilogue by Sarah Vowell Borrowing. The book's name, from an Adriaen van der Werff painting, "Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules," is David Sedaris's attempt to share his passion for short stories with a wider audience -- and his enthusiasm is contagious. "The authors in this book are huge to me, and I am a comparative midget, scratching around in their collective shadow. 'Pint sized Fanatic Bowing Before Statues of Hercules' might have been more concise, but people don't paint things like that, and besides, it doesn't sound as good." David Sedaris is publishing this book to support 826NYC, a nonprofit tutoring center in Brooklyn, New York. All of his proceeds, after permission expenses, from Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules will benefit this organization designed to help students ages six to eighteen develop their writing skills through free writing workshops, publishing projects, and one-on-one help with homework and English-language learning. In the book's epilogue, Sarah Vowell describes the fine work done by 826NYC.
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Me Talk Pretty One Day David Sedaris became a star autobiographer on public radio, onstage in New York, and on bestseller lists, mostly on the strength of SantaLand Diaries, a scathing, hilarious account of his stint as a Christmas elf at Macy's. (It's in two separate collections, both worth owning, Barrel Fever and the Christmas-themed Holidays on Ice.) Sedaris's caustic gift has not deserted him in his fourth book, which mines poignant comedy from his peculiar childhood in North Carolina, his bizarre career path, and his move with his lover to France. Though his anarchic inclination to digress is his glory, Sedaris does have a theme in these reminiscences: the inability of humans to communicate. The title is his rendition in transliterated English of how he and his fellow students of French in Paris mangle the Gallic language. In the essay, "Jesus Shaves," he and his classmates from many nations try to convey the concept of Easter to a Moroccan Muslim. "It is a party for the little boy of God," says one. "Then he be die one day on two... morsels of... lumber," says another. Sedaris muses on the disputes between his Protestant mother and his father, a Greek Orthodox guy whose Easter fell on a different day. Other essays explicate his deep kinship with his eccentric mom and absurd alienation from his IBM-exec dad: "To me, the greatest mystery of science continues to be that a man could father six children who shared absolutely none of his interests." Every glimpse we get of Sedaris's family and acquaintances delivers laughs and insights. He thwarts his North Carolina speech therapist ("for whom the word pen had two syllables") by cleverly avoiding all words with s sounds, which reveal the lisp she sought to correct. His midget guitar teacher, Mister Mancini, is unaware that Sedaris doesn't share his obsession with breasts, and sings "Light My Fire" all wrong -- "as if he were a Webelo scout demanding a match." As a remarkably unqualified teacher at the Art Institute of Chicago, Sedaris had his class watch soap operas and assign "guessays" on what would happen in the next day's episode. It all adds up to the most distinctively skewed autobiography since Spalding Gray's Swimming to Cambodia. The only possible reason not to read this book is if you'd rather hear the author's intrinsically funny speaking voice narrating his story. In that case, get Me Talk Pretty One Day on audio.
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Dress
Your Family in Corduroy and Denim David
Sedaris plays in the snow with his sisters.
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David Sedaris Live at Carnegie Hall If you are driving, pull over. If you are at work, close your door-unless you don't mind your colleagues seeing you doubled over, in tears, on your office floor. With this CD, taped before a delirious sold out audience at Carnegie Hall, you are there as David Sedaris performs new stories from his upcoming book. A parrot who mimics an ice maker, lovers quarreling over a rubber hand, and a Santa Claus who moonlights from his job as bishop of Turkey -- the cast of characters in these stories is like no other. This new work will appeal to David's loyal fans as well as admirers of the classic comedy albums of George Carlin, Bill Cosby and Steve Martin. |
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Naked "Perchance, fair lady, dost thou think me unduly vexed by the sorrowful state of thine quarters? These foul specks, the evidence of life itself, have sullied not only thine shag-tempered matt but also thine character. Be ye mad, woman?" In Naked, David Sedaris's message -- alternately rendered in "Fakespeare," Italian, Spanish, and pidgin Greek -- is the same: pay attention to me. Whether he's taking to the road with a thieving quadriplegic, sorting out the fancy from the extra-fancy in a bleak fruit-packing factory, or celebrating Christmas in the company of a recently paroled prostitute, this collection of memoirs creates a wickedly incisive portrait of an all-too-familiar world. It takes Sedaris from his humiliating bout with obsessive behavior in "A Plague of Tics" to the title story, in which he is finally forced to face his naked self in the mirrored sunglasses of a lunatic. At this soulful and moving moment, he picks potato chip crumbs from his pubic hair and wonders what it all means. This remarkable journey into his own life follows a path of self-effacement and a lifelong search for identity, leaving him both under suspicion and overdressed.
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 Barrel Fever A collection of stories and essays based upon Sedaris's own experiences and the hidden perversity that can be found in Anytown, U.S.A. Here are images and blasphemies that nice people don't dare look at--blatantly exposed and told with the clear, casual voice of intimate knowledge. Sedaris' humor is born of compassion and his tales range from the sharing of cheery Christmas letters featuring infanticide, to experiences of the Gay and Famous (Charlton Heston and Elizabeth Dole, for example), to the lives of siblings named Hope, Faith, Charity and Adolph and to alcoholics and chain smokers you can laugh with. NOTE: The audiotape includes a combination of previously unpublished material and stories from the original book that turned Sedaris into a bestselling author. Here, listeners will laugh out loud as a do-it-yourself suburban dad saves money by performing home surgery, a man who is loved too much flees the heavyweight champion of the world, and a teenage suicide attempts to incite a lynch mob at her own funeral.
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Holidays on Ice This wonderfully subversive holiday gift package reprints Sedaris' deliciously acerbic short story "The Santaland Diaries" and combines it with two equally sardonic Sedaris Christmas classics plus an all-new holiday tale. For everyone who's had enough of the forced good cheer, family madness, and commercial overkill of Christmas, "Holiday on Ice" is the perfect antidote.
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