Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris

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Happy-Go-Lucky

by: David Sedaris
Release date: May 31, 2022
Number of Pages: 272
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David Sedaris, the “champion storyteller,” (Los Angeles Times) returns with his first new collection of personal essays since the bestselling Calypso. Back when restaurant menus were still printed on paper, and wearing a mask—or not—was a decision made mostly on Halloween, David Sedaris spent his time doing normal things. As Happy-Go-Lucky opens, he is learning to shoot guns with his sister, visiting muddy flea markets in Serbia, buying gummy worms to feed to ants, and telling his nonagenarian father wheelchair jokes. But then the pandemic hits, and like so many others, he’s stuck in lockdown, unable to tour and read for audiences, the part of his work he loves most. To cope, he walks for miles through a nearly deserted city, smelling only his own breath. He vacuums his apartment twice a day, fails to hoard anything, and contemplates how sex workers and acupuncturists might be getting by during quarantine. As the world gradually settles into a new reality, Sedaris too finds himself changed. His offer to fix a stranger’s teeth rebuffed, he straightens his own, and ventures into the world with new confidence. Newly orphaned, he considers what it means, in his seventh decade, no longer to be someone’s son. And back on the road, he discovers a battle-scarred America: people weary, storefronts empty or festooned with Help Wanted signs, walls painted with graffiti reflecting the contradictory messages of our time: Eat the Rich. Trump 2024. Black Lives Matter. In Happy-Go-Lucky, David Sedaris once again captures what is most unexpected, hilarious, and poignant about these recent upheavals, personal and public, and expresses in precise language both the misanthropy and desire for connection that drive us all. If we must live in interesting times, there is no one better to chronicle them than the incomparable David Sedaris.

More books by David Sedaris

1. A Carnival of Snackeries

by: David Sedaris
Release date: Oct 07, 2021
Number of Pages: 528
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2. A Carnival Of Snackery

by: David Sedaris
Release date: Oct 05, 2021
Number of Pages: 560
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A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice There’s no right way to keep a diary, but if there’s an entertaining way, David Sedaris seems to have mas­tered it. If it’s navel-gazing you’re after, you’ve come to the wrong place; ditto treacly self-examination. Rather, his observations turn outward: a fight between two men on a bus, a fight between two men on the street, pedestrians being whacked over the head or gathering to watch as a man considers leap­ing to his death. There’s a dirty joke shared at a book signing, then a dirtier one told at a dinner party—lots of jokes here. Plenty of laughs. These diaries remind you that you once really hated George W. Bush, and that not too long ago, Donald Trump was just a harm­less laughingstock, at least on French TV. Time marches on, and Sedaris, at his desk or on planes, in hotel dining rooms and odd Japanese inns, records it. The entries here reflect an ever-changing background—new administrations, new restrictions on speech and conduct. What you can say at the start of the book, you can’t by the end. At its best, A Carnival of Snackery is a sort of sampler: the bitter and the sweet. Some entries are just what you wanted. Others you might want to spit discreetly into a napkin.

3. The Best Of Me

by: David Sedaris
Release date: Nov 03, 2020
Number of Pages: 464
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“Genius… It is miraculous to read these pieces… You must read The Best of Me.” —Andrew Sean Greer, New York Times Book Review A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice A CNN and Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Month For more than twenty-five years, David Sedaris has been carving out a unique literary space, virtually creating his own genre. A Sedaris story may seem confessional, but is also highly attuned to the world outside. It opens our eyes to what is at absurd and moving about our daily existence. And it is almost impossible to read without laughing. Now, for the first time collected in one volume, the author brings us his funniest and most memorable work. In these stories, Sedaris shops for rare taxidermy, hitchhikes with a lady quadriplegic, and spits a lozenge into a fellow traveler’s lap. He drowns a mouse in a bucket, struggles to say “give it to me” in five languages, and hand-feeds a carnivorous bird. But if all you expect to find in Sedaris’s work is the deft and sharply observed comedy for which he became renowned, you may be surprised to discover that his words bring more warmth than mockery, more fellow-feeling than derision. Nowhere is this clearer than in his writing about his loved ones. In these pages, Sedaris explores falling in love and staying together, recognizing his own aging not in the mirror but in the faces of his siblings, losing one parent and coming to terms—at long last—with the other. Taken together, the stories in TheBest of Me reveal the wonder and delight Sedaris takes in the surprises life brings him. No experience, he sees, is quite as he expected—it’s often harder, more fraught, and certainly weirder—but sometimes it is also much richer and more wonderful. Full of joy, generosity, and the incisive humor that has led David Sedaris to be called “the funniest man alive” (Time Out New York), The Best of Me spans a career spent watching and learning and laughing—quite often at himself—and invites readers deep into the world of one of the most brilliant and original writers of our time.

4. Calypso

by: David Sedaris
Release date: May 29, 2018
Number of Pages: 272
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David Sedaris returns with his most deeply personal and darkly hilarious book. If you’ve ever laughed your way through David Sedaris’s cheerfully misanthropic stories, you might think you know what you’re getting with Calypso. You’d be wrong. When he buys a beach house on the Carolina coast, Sedaris envisions long, relaxing vacations spent playing board games and lounging in the sun with those he loves most. And life at the Sea Section, as he names the vacation home, is exactly as idyllic as he imagined, except for one tiny, vexing realization: it’s impossible to take a vacation from yourself. With Calypso, Sedaris sets his formidable powers of observation toward middle age and mortality. Make no mistake: these stories are very, very funny–it’s a book that can make you laugh ’til you snort, the way only family can. Sedaris’s powers of observation have never been sharper, and his ability to shock readers into laughter unparalleled. But much of the comedy here is born out of that vertiginous moment when your own body betrays you and you realize that the story of your life is made up of more past than future. This is beach reading for people who detest beaches, required reading for those who loathe small talk and love a good tumor joke. Calypso is simultaneously Sedaris’s darkest and warmest book yet–and it just might be his very best.

5. David Sedaris Diaries

by: David SedarisJeffrey Jenkins
Release date: Oct 10, 2017
Number of Pages: 256
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A remarkable illustrated volume of artwork and images selected from the diaries David Sedaris has been creating for four decades In this richly illustrated book, readers will for the first time experience the diaries David Sedaris has kept for nearly 40 years in the elaborate, three-dimensional, collaged style of the originals. A celebration of the unexpected in the everyday, the beautiful and the grotesque, this visual compendium offers unique insight into the author’s view of the world and stands as a striking and collectible volume in itself. Compiled and edited by Sedaris’s longtime friend Jeffrey Jenkins, and including interactive components, postcards, and never-before-seen photos and artwork, this is a necessary addition to any Sedaris collection, and will enthrall the author’s fans for many years to come.

6. Theft By Finding

by: David Sedaris
Release date: May 30, 2017
Number of Pages: 528
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One of the most anticipated books of 2017: Boston Globe, New York Times Book Review, New York’s “Vulture”, The Week, Bustle, BookRiot An NPR Best Book of 2017An AV Club Favorite Book of 2017A Barnes & Noble Best Book of 2017A Goodreads Choice Awards nominee David Sedaris tells all in a book that is, literally, a lifetime in the making. 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 how a drug-abusing dropout with a weakness for the International House of Pancakes and a chronic inability to hold down a real job became one of the funniest people on the planet. Written with a sharp eye and ear for the bizarre, the beautiful, and the uncomfortable, and with a generosity of spirit that even a misanthropic sense of humor can’t fully disguise, Theft By Finding proves that Sedaris is one of our great modern observers. It’s a potent reminder that when you’re as perceptive and curious as Sedaris, there’s no such thing as a boring day.

7. Two Classic Stories

by: David Sedaris
Release date: Mar 04, 2014
Number of Pages: 64
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David Sedaris’ remarkable ability to uncover the hilarious absurdity teeming just below the surface of everyday life is on full display in these two stories taken from his bestselling books: Me Talk Pretty One Day and When You Are Engulfed in Flames. ‘A humorist par excellence, he can make Woody Allen appear ham-tongued, Oscar Wilde a drag’ Observer

8. Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls

by: David Sedaris
Release date: Apr 23, 2013
Number of Pages: 288
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A guy walks into a bar car and… From here the story could take many turns. When this guy is David Sedaris, the possibilities are endless, but the result is always the same: he will both delight you with twists of humor and intelligence and leave you deeply moved. Sedaris remembers his father’s dinnertime attire (shirtsleeves and underpants), his first colonoscopy (remarkably pleasant), and the time he considered buying the skeleton of a murdered Pygmy. With Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, David Sedaris shows once again why his work has been called “hilarious, elegant, and surprisingly moving” (Washington Post).

9. Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk

by: David Sedaris
Release date: Sep 28, 2010
Number of Pages: 176
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Featuring David Sedaris’s unique blend of hilarity and heart, this new collection of keen-eyed animal-themed tales is an utter delight. Though the characters may not be human, the situations in these stories bear an uncanny resemblance to the insanity of everyday life. In “The Toad, the Turtle, and the Duck,” three strangers commiserate about animal bureaucracy while waiting in a complaint line. In “Hello Kitty,” a cynical feline struggles to sit through his prison-mandated AA meetings. In “The Squirrel and the Chipmunk,” a pair of star-crossed lovers is separated by prejudiced family members. With original illustrations by Ian Falconer, author of the bestselling Olivia series of children’s books, these stories are David Sedaris at his most observant, poignant, and surprising.

10. Dress Your Family In Corduroy And Denim

by: David Sedaris
Release date: Sep 16, 2010
Number of Pages: 272
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‘No one has a turn of phrase like David Sedaris. This series of essays about his life and family is a joy from start to finish’ Adam Kay David Sedaris plays in the snow with his sisters. He goes on vacation with his family. He gets a job selling drinks. He attends his brother’s wedding. He mops his sister’s floor. He gives directions to a lost traveller. He eats a hamburger. He has his blood sugar tested. It all sounds so normal, doesn’t it? In his new book David Sedaris lifts the corner of ordinary life, revealing the absurdity teeming below its surface. His world is alive with obscure desires and hidden motives – a world where forgiveness is automatic and an argument can be the highest form of love. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim finds one of the wittiest and most original writers at work today at the peak of his form.

11. Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules

by: David Sedaris
Release date: Apr 01, 2010
Number of Pages: 256
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‘When apple-picking season ended, I got a Job in a packing plant and gravitated towards 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 then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit . . . Once, before leaving on vacation, I copied an entire page from an Alice Munro story and left it in my typewriter, hoping a burglar might come upon it and mistake her words for my own. That an intruder would spend his valuable time reading, that he might be impressed by the description of a crooked face, was something I did not question, as I believed, and still do, that stories can save you’.

12. The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2010

by: Dave EggersDavid Sedaris
Release date: Jan 01, 2010
Number of Pages: 484
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A volume edited by the editor of McSweeney’s and the author of What Is the What and Zeitoun, offers a collection of fiction, nonfiction, alternative comics, screenplays, blog entries and more, with an introduction by the author of When You Are Engulfed in Flames. Original. 75,000 first printing.

13. Holidays On Ice

by: David Sedaris
Release date: May 04, 2009
Number of Pages: 128
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David Sedaris’s beloved holiday collection is new again with six more pieces, including a never before published story. Along with such favorites as the diaries of a Macy’s elf and the annals of two very competitive families, are Sedaris’s tales of tardy trick-or-treaters (“Us and Them”); the difficulties of explaining the Easter Bunny to the French (“Jesus Shaves”); what to do when you’ve been locked out in a snowstorm (“Let It Snow”); the puzzling Christmas traditions of other nations (“Six to Eight Black Men”); what Halloween at the medical examiner’s looks like (“The Monster Mash”); and a barnyard secret Santa scheme gone awry (“Cow and Turkey”). No matter what your favorite holiday, you won’t want to miss celebrating it with the author who has been called “one of the funniest writers alive” (Economist).

14. Me Talk Pretty One Day

by: David Sedaris
Release date: May 04, 2009
Number of Pages: 288
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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. His family is another inspiration. You Cant Kill the Rooster is a portrait of his brother who talks incessant hip-hop 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. Sedaris is an amazing reader whose appearances draw hundreds, and his performancesincluding a jaw-dropping impression of Billie Holiday singing I wish I were an Oscar Meyer weinerare unforgettable. Sedariss essays on living in Paris are some of the funniest hes ever written. At last, someone even meaner than the French! The sort of blithely sophisticated, loopy humour that might have resulted if Dorothy Parker and James Thurber had had a love child. Entertainment Weekly on Barrel Fever Sidesplitting Not one of the essays in this new collection failed to crack me up; frequently I was helpless. The New York Times Book Review on Naked

15. Naked

by: David Sedaris
Release date: May 04, 2009
Number of Pages: 304
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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, where 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.

16. Barrel Fever

by: David Sedaris
Release date: May 04, 2009
Number of Pages: 208
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In David Sedaris’ world, no one is safe and no cow is sacred. A manic cross between Mark Leyner, Fran Lebowitz, and the National Enquirer, Sedaris’ collection of essays is a rollicking tour through the national Zeitgeist: 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; a teenage suicide tries to incite a lynch mob at her funeral; a bitter Santa abuses the elves. David Sedaris made his debut on NPR’s Morning Edition with “SantaLand Diaries”, recounting his strange-but-true experiences as an elf at Macy’s, and soon became one of the show’s most popular commentators. With a perfect eye and a voice infused with as much empathy as wit, Sedaris writes stories and essays that target the soulful ridiculousness of our behavior. Barrel Fever is like a blind date with modern life, and anything can happen.

17. When You Are Engulfed In Flames

by: David Sedaris
Release date: Jun 03, 2008
Number of Pages: 336
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“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). Praise for When You Are Engulfed in Flames: “Older, wiser, smarter and meaner, Sedaris…defies the odds once again by delivering an intelligent take on the banalities of an absurd life.” –Kirkus Reviews This latest collection proves that not only does Sedaris still have it, but he’s also getting better….Sedaris’s best stuff will still–after all this time–move, surprise, and entertain.” –Booklist Table of Contents: It’s Catching Keeping Up The Understudy This Old House Buddy, Can You Spare a Tie? Road Trips What I Learned That’s Amore The Monster Mash In the Waiting Room Solutions to Saturday’s Puzzle Adult Figures Charging Toward a Concrete Toadstool Memento Mori All the Beauty You Will Ever Need Town and Country Aerial The Man in the Hut Of Mice and Men April in Paris Crybaby Old Faithful The Smoking Section

18. Un Vestido de Domingo

by: David Sedaris
Release date: Dec 01, 2005
Number of Pages: 228
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Un vestido de domingo retoma los elementos clásicos en la narrativa de David Sedaris; la mezcla, en clave humorística, de la ficción y la autobiografía del autor. En esta colección de retratos y anécdotas, Sedaris revela el lado más absurdo de la cotidianidad: se marcha de vacaciones con su familia, asiste a la boda de su hermano, se hace un análisis de sangre, se come una hamburguesa. Todas ellas son actividades perfectamente normales, que no obstante, en el mundo de Sedaris, adquieren una comicidad insospechada. Conocido por las delirantes e impúdicas historias que contaba en un programa de radio americano, Sedaris explica de si mismo que vive ‘esperando material’ para sus narraciones, historias que vuelca a sus libros a través de la ironía. Con la lectura de dichas anécdotas es fácil comprender el porqué de su espectacular éxito mundial como humorista. “Uno no es proclive a explicar la carrera de un autor a partir de las excentricidades y los detalles morbosos de su vida personal, pero se siente autorizado a hacer una excepción cuando esas excentricidades y detalles, como en el caso de David Sedaris, son el objeto y razón de ser la su carrera. En resumen: la bomba Sedaris estalló por primera vez en 1993, cuando la National Public Radio empezó a emitir desde Nueva York una serie de extrañas historias donde un limpiador gay de apartamentos, inmigrante griego de segunda generación, con acento de Carolina y una vida laboral atribulada hasta extremos imposibles, narraba episodios descabelladamente impúdicos de su vida. El éxito inverosímil de aquel serial sonrojante puso en alerta a los principales editores del país: ¡un colgado le estaba explicando su vida patética a América y a América le gustaba!” Javier Calvo. “Estaba leyendo a Sedaris en la oficina mientras comía y casi me atraganto de larisa con sus historias, es un escritor fabuloso.” The New York Times Book Review

19. Live at Carnegie Hall

by: David Sedaris
Release date: Nov 13, 2003
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20. Je parler français

by: David Sedaris
Release date: Sep 01, 2002
Number of Pages: 318
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” Quand je suis parti en France l’été suivant, je ne connaissais qu’un mot de français : bouchon. En atterrissant à l’aéroport j’ai dit bouchon ; dans le train qui m’emportait vers la Normandie, je disais bouchon (…). L’été suivant nous sommes revenus en France. J’ai pu ajouter 420 mots à ma collection, la plupart piochés dans Voici.” Ce roman burlesque et insolent de David Sedaris relate son enfance en Caroline du Nord. Tout jeune, on lui diagnostique une paresse chronique de la langue. Il est comme son professeur de guitare, un adulte piégé dans un corps d’enfant. David va tour à tour se chercher et se perdre dans plusieurs domaines, mais il sent vite qu’il n’a aucun talent. Il est le vilain petit canard, l’homosexuel, le drogué, celui qui zozote. Je parler français est l’histoire irrésistiblement drôle de sa vie, de ses nombreuses déceptions, de sa quête d’une certaine idée du bonheur.

21. The Book of Liz

by: Amy SedarisDavid Sedaris
Release date: Jan 01, 2002
Number of Pages: 50
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THE STORY: Sister Elizabeth Donderstock is Squeamish, has been her whole life. She makes cheese balls (traditional and smoky) that sustain the existence of her entire religious community, Clusterhaven. However, she feels unappreciated among her Squ

22. The Santaland Diaries ; And, Season’s Greetings

by: David Sedaris
Release date: Jan 01, 1998
Number of Pages: 54
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THE STORIES: THE SANTALAND DIARIES is a brilliant evocation of what a slacker’s Christmas must feel like. Out of work, our slacker decides to become a Macy’s elf during the holiday crunch. At first the job is simply humiliating, but once the thousa

Last updated on Sunday, July 17, 2022