David Sedaris

Personal essays share the author's adventures after buying a vacation house on the Carolina coast and his reflections on middle age and mortality. This is beach reading for people who detest beaches, required reading for those who loathe small talk, and also Sedaris' darkest and warmest book yet.

Me Talk Pretty One Day, tells a most unconventional life story. It begins with a North Carolina childhood filled with speech-therapy classes ("There was the lisp, of course, but more troubling than that was my voice itself, with its excitable tone and high, girlish pitch") and unwanted guitar lessons taught by a midget. From budding performance artist ("The only crimp in my plan was that I seemed to have no talent whatsoever") to "clearly unqualified"...

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, Sedaris' sixth essay collection will...

For forty years, David Sedaris has kept a diary in which he records everything that captures his attention -- overheard comments, salacious gossip, soap opera plot twists, secrets confided by total strangers. These observations are the source code for his finest work, and through them he has honed his cunning, surprising sentences. Now, Sedaris shares his private writings with the world. Theft by Finding, the first of two volumes, is the story of...

A collection of essays and stories in which a do-it-yourself surburban dad saves money by performing home surgery, a man who is loved too much flees the heavyweight champion of the world, a bitter Santa abuses the elves, a teenage suicide tries to incite a lynch mob at her funeral and so on.

The American humorist, author, and radio contributor shares his most memorable work in a collection of stories and essays that feature him shopping for rare taxidermy, hitchhiking with a quadriplegic, and hand-feeding a carnivorous bird.

From the perils of French dentistry to the eating habits of the Australian kookaburra, from the squat-style toilets of Beijing to the particular wilderness of a North Carolina Costco, we learn about the absurdity and delight of a curious traveler's experiences. Whether railing against the habits of litterers in the English countryside or marveling over a disembodied human arm in a taxidermist's shop, Sedaris takes us on side-splitting adventures that...

February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,” the...

"In this hilarious illustrated fable, Anna Van Ogre loses her lovely monstrous looks and is turned into a sickeningly adorable, rosy-cheeked little girl. It starts her on a journey to learn an unforgettable lesson about true beauty"--

National Public Radio presents a collection of entertaining stories and informational experiences focused on traveling around the globe.