From The New York Times Book Review, Craig Seligman
I recently made the mistake of reading David Sedaris while I was eating lunch. Fortunately, I was alone in my office, so there were no witnesses when I spewed a mouthful of pastrami across my desk. Not one of the 17 autobiographical essays in this new collection failed to make me crack up; frequently I was helpless.

From Booklist
Readers familiar with Sedaris' hilarious National Public Radio commentaries will hear his distinctive radio voice in their minds as they read his newest collection of wicked autobiographical writings, but few if any of these unnervingly frank, cynical, and explicit tales are suitable for the airwaves -- and therein lies their power. As Sedaris chronicles the low points of his life, from his suffering as a boy from debilitatingly compulsive behavior (licking light switches, counting steps) to his earliest, terrifying intimations of his homosexuality, to some near-death hitchhiking experiences, he goes further than he's ever gone before, leaving his readers breathless with laughter and wide-eyed with wonder at his daring both out in the world and on the page. A self-described "smart-ass," Sedaris is a gifted satirist with an uncanny knack for re-creating dialogue and revealing fantasies. And his targets are always worthy: people of wretched insensitivity and prejudice, be it sexual or racial. Brutally honest and brilliantly eloquent, Sedaris is positively tonic.
-- Donna Seaman
Copyright© 1997, American Library Association. All rights reserved.

From Kirkus Reviews
In this collection of essays, playwright and NPR commentator Sedaris tops his anarchically hilarious miscellany, Barrel Fever (1994), by inventing a new genre: autobiography as fun-house mirror. From the first sentence ("I'm thinking of asking the servants to wax my change before placing it in the Chinese tank I keep on my dresser''), Naked pretty well clobbers the reader into dizzy submission. Growing up in Raleigh, N.C., Sedaris had disruptive nervous tics that only disappeared once he took up smoking, which, "despite its health risks, is much more socially acceptable than crying out in tiny voices.'' The author volunteered at a mental hospital and spoke solely in Shakespearean English for a spell. One Christmas his sister brought home a coworker who moonlighted as a prostitute: "From this moment on, the phrase `ho, ho, ho' would take on a whole different meaning.'' Sedaris's best humor is generally rooted in misery: At college he befriended "a fun girl with a degenerative nerve disease'' and confined to a wheelchir, with whom he successfully shoplifted (no one stopped them) and hitchhiked (everyone stopped for them); he astutely illuminates the weird mixture of altruism and vanity that motivated him to become his friend's caretaker. Sedaris's extensive resume of hitchhiking trips and dire jobs has provided him with an absurd array of distressing incidental characters, like the belligerent, legless Jesus freak for whom he worked making jade clocks in the shape of Oregon. The author's wisecracking mother emerges as a full-blown comic heroine, and the essay discussing the months before her death achieves a brilliant synthesis of solemnity and humor. Only at the end, when describing a visit to a downscale nudist camp, does Sedaris disappoint, as he seems to have gone on the jaunt solely to acquire filler material. Sedaris applies the same deadpan fastidiousness to his life that Charlie Chaplin applied to his shoe in The Gold Rush -- this is splendid stuff.
-- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
Barrel Fever

From Whole Earth Review
. . . refreshing, enlightening and hysterically funny . . .

From Booklist
Sedaris' sardonic wit will already be familiar to listeners to National Public Radio's Morning Edition, but the venom he exposes in these pages proves he is more than a cuddly curmudgeon. Here he lets loose with a devastating comic ire worthy of Dorothy Parker. Demonstrating low tolerance for human foibles, his misanthropic humor is vindictive and nasty. More than once it crosses the line of good taste, but it's also extremely, relentlessly funny. The short stories in this collection dwell on themes of domestic hell and self-delusion as dysfunctional families tear each other apart and losers refuse to see how pathetic they are. The essays, some of which have in different form been heard on radio, effectively and humorously detail the seeming contemporary cultural conspiracy to destroy the individual. His "Santaland Diaries," which depicts his experiences working as an elf at Macy's during the winter holiday season, in particular is a minor classic.
-- Benjamin Segedin
Copyright© 1994, American Library Association. All rights reserved.

SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
(Little, Brown, 2004)

Amazon.com Audio Review
It just isn’t fair: most of us would be lucky to be able to express ourselves in writing half as well as David Sedaris does in his new book, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. But on top of his skills with the written word, the author also has substantial gifts as a performer, and he proves this on the audio version of the book. In his essay, "The Change in Me," Sedaris remembers that his mother was good at imitating people, and it’s clear that he takes after her. Whether he’s doing impressions of high-voiced brother Paul, or recalling times when he and his sisters tried to win good karma by speaking and acting like well-behaved, fairytale children, Sedaris’s nuanced performance hits the right note on both the opening, comedic stories, and the more poignant essays that tend to come later in the reading. In fact, for those who have already read some of the best stories in other publications including The New Yorker, the CD or cassette version of this collection is probably the best bet for furthering your appreciation of the material.

Sedaris’s career is closely linked with two things: audio (he was discovered by NPR’s Ira Glass), and the personal lives of himself and his family. In Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, he describes fights with his boyfriend, and his sister-in-law’s difficult pregnancy. When sister Lisa complains about the stories involving the family, he writes about that, too. Sedaris's latest provides more evidence that he is a great humorist, memoirist and raconteur, and readers are lucky to have the opportunity to know him so well. Perhaps they are luckier still not to know him personally.
-- Leah Weathersby

From Publishers Weekly
In his latest collection, Sedaris has found his heart. This is not to suggest that the author of Me Talk Pretty One Day and other bestselling books has lost his edge. The 27 essays here (many previously published in Esquire, G.Q. or the New Yorker, or broadcast on PRI's This American Life) include his best and funniest writing yet. Here is Sedaris's family in all its odd glory. Here is his father dragging his mortified son over to the home of one of the most popular boys in school, a boy possessed of "an uncanny ability to please people," demanding that the boy's parents pay for the root canal that Sedaris underwent after the boy hit him in the mouth with a rock. Here is his oldest sister, Lisa, imploring him to keep her beloved Amazon parrot out of a proposed movie based on his writing. ("'Will I have to be fat in the movie?' she asked.") Here is his mother, his muse, locking the kids out of the house after one snow day too many, playing the wry, brilliant commentator on his life until her untimely death from cancer. His mother emerges as one of the most poignant and original female characters in contemporary literature. She balances bitter and sweet, tart and rich — and so does Sedaris, because this is what life is like. "You should look at yourself," his mother says in one piece, as young Sedaris crams Halloween candy into his mouth rather than share it. He does what she says and then some, and what emerges is the deepest kind of humor, the human comedy.
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