David Sedaris's best stories and essays, spanning his remarkable career—as selected and read by the author himself. Featuring fresh and classic recordings, including a new essay and an interview exclusive to the audiobook.
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 listen 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 essays, 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 performances 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 listeners deep into the world of one of the most brilliant and original writers of our time.
The Best of Me AUDIOBOOK TRACK LISTING
Introduction (new recording)
From Barrel Fever 1994
Glen's Homophobia Newsletter Vol. 3, No. 2.
From Holidays on Ice 1994
Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol (new recording)
Christmas Means Giving (new recording)
From Naked 1997
the incomplete quad (new recording)
From the New Yorker
Girl Crazy (new recording)
Card Wired (new recording)
How to Spend the Budget Surplus (new recording)
From Me Talk Pretty One Day 2000
You Can't Kill the Rooster (new recording)
Me Talk Pretty One Day (new recording)
Jesus Shaves (new recording)
From the New Yorker
Dog Days (new recording)
From Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Demin 2004
Us and Them
Let It Snow
The Ship Shape
The Girl Next Door
Repeat After Me
Six to Eight Black Men (live recording)
Possession
Nuit of the Living Dead
From When You Are Engulfed in Flames 2008
Solution to Saturday's Puzzle (live recording)
The...
David Sedaris's best stories and essays, spanning his remarkable career—as selected and read by the author himself. Featuring fresh and classic recordings, including a new essay and an interview exclusive to the audiobook.
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 listen 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 essays, 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 performances 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 listeners deep into the world of one of the most brilliant and original writers of our time.
The Best of Me AUDIOBOOK TRACK LISTING
Introduction (new recording)
From Barrel Fever 1994
Glen's Homophobia Newsletter Vol. 3, No. 2.
From Holidays on Ice 1994
Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol (new recording)
Christmas Means Giving (new recording)
From Naked 1997
the incomplete quad (new recording)
From the New Yorker
Girl Crazy (new recording)
Card Wired (new recording)
How to Spend the Budget Surplus (new recording)
From Me Talk Pretty One Day 2000
You Can't Kill the Rooster (new recording)
Me Talk Pretty One Day (new recording)
Jesus Shaves (new recording)
From the New Yorker
Dog Days (new recording)
From Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Demin 2004
Us and Them
Let It Snow
The Ship Shape
The Girl Next Door
Repeat After Me
Six to Eight Black Men (live recording)
Possession
Nuit of the Living Dead
From When You Are Engulfed in Flames 2008
Solution to Saturday's Puzzle (live recording)
The...
Reviews-
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Starred review from September 21, 2020
Sedaris’s brilliant knack for observational humor is on full display in this terrific retrospective essay collection (after Calypso). Culled from his previously published volumes and magazine pieces, this work focuses on the dynamics among the six Sedaris siblings and their parents (“I might reinvent myself to strangers, but to this day, as far as my family is concerned, I’m still the one most likely to set your house on fire,” he admits). Whether searching for the perfect Paris apartment with his partner, Hugh, recalling long-ago family vacations, or describing his sister Amy’s freaky encounter with a psychic, Sedaris finds ample fodder for his keen satiric sense in his life and the lives of those around him. Sedaris can take even the most serious subject—such as his sister Tiffany’s suicide—and evoke both empathy and laughter. He can also be just plain hilarious, as in “Jesus Shaves,” about a discussion of cultural differences using the limited vocabulary available to students in a beginner French class (“The rabbit of Easter. He bring of the chocolate”). This is the perfect introduction for the uninitiated, while Sedaris’s fans will enjoy rediscovering old favorites. Agent: Cristina Concepcion, Don Congdon Assoc. -
Master humorist David Sedaris selected many of his (and our) favorite essays to narrate for this wonderful collection of his work. From "Glen's Homophobia Newsletter Vol. 3, No. 2" to a never before published essay, "Unbuttoned," Sedaris is at his best both as author and narrator. With his keen eye for detail and his scalpel wit, Sedaris delivers glimpses of his wonderfully weird world with these sometimes snarky, sometimes sweet commentaries. Sounding sassy, edgy, and delightful, Sedaris expands listeners' awareness of the frequent absurdities life throws his (and our) way, touching our emotions and tickling our funnybones. Even within the most personal, autobiographical stories, the themes are universal. Sedaris's observations are spot-on and good for a grimace or a giggle, making for perfect anytime listening. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
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October 15, 2020
In his introduction to the first best-of compilation of his work, Sedaris writes that it's impossible to know if he'd like his own writing if he were someone else; he would like, though, "that so much of it has to do with family." Of the nearly 50 career-spanning stories and essays gathered here, previously published in Barrel Fever (1994), Calypso (2018), one of Sedaris' seven intervening books, or the New Yorker, later pieces especially bring family into poignant focus. Sedaris vacations with his siblings, ruminates on his mother's alcoholism, copes with his estranged younger sister's death, and visits his severely diminished father at the end of his life. Sedaris' distinctive voice is one of the delights of his work, and he embodies his childhood self and others?a theater critic eviscerating an elementary-school play; an Irish Setter who finally understands the pressures of monogamy?with ease. Readable is one thing Sedaris' work very enjoyably is; re-readable is another. Longtime fans are used to reading Sedaris in pieces, but the encompassing effect of his writing?sardonic, piercing, humorous, and humane?grows exponentially here.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.) -
Starred review from December 1, 2020
A welcome greatest-hits package from Sedaris. It's not easy to pick out fact from fiction in the author's sidelong takes on family, travel, relationships, and other topics. He tends toward the archly droll in either genre, both well represented in this gathering, always with a perfectly formed crystallization of our various embarrassments and discomforts. An example is a set piece that comes fairly early in the anthology: the achingly funny "Me Talk Pretty One Day," with its spot-on reminiscence of taking a French class with a disdainful instructor, a roomful of clueless but cheerful students, and Sedaris himself, who mangles the language gloriously, finally coming to understand his teacher's baleful utterances ("Every day spent with you is like having a cesarean section") without being able to reply in any way that does not destroy the language of Voltaire and Proust. Sedaris' register ranges from doggerel to deeply soulful, as when he reflects on the death of a beloved sibling and its effects on a family that has been too often portrayed as dysfunctional when it's really just odd: "The word," he writes, "is overused....My father hoarding food inside my sister's vagina would be dysfunctional. His hoarding it beneath the bathroom sink, as he is wont to do, is, at best, quirky and at worst unsanitary." There's not a dud in the mix, though Sedaris is always at his best when he's both making fun of himself and satirizing some larger social trend (of dog-crazy people, for instance: "They're the ones who, when asked if they have children, are likely to answer, 'A black Lab and a sheltie-beagle mix named Tuckahoe' "). It's a lovely m�lange by a modern Mark Twain who is always willing to set himself up as a shlemiel in the interest of a good yarn. One of the funniest--and truest--books in recent memory and a must-have for fans of the poet laureate of human foibles.COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
