Download or read book Let s Explore Diabetes with Owls written by David Sedaris and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2013-04-23 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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).
Download or read book Happy Go Lucky written by David Sedaris and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk written by David Sedaris and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2010-09-28 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book When You Are Engulfed in Flames written by David Sedaris and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2008-06-03 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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
Download or read book David Sedaris Diaries written by David Sedaris and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2017-10-10 with total page 716 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Barrel Fever written by David Sedaris and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2010-08-05 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In David Sedaris's world, no one is safe and no cow is sacred. A manic cross between Mark Leyner, Fran Lebowitz and the National Enquirer, Sedaris's collection of stories and essays is a rollicking tour through the American Zeitgeist: a man who is loved too much flees the heavyweight champion of the world; a teenage suicide tried to incite a lynch mob at her funeral; and in his essays, David Sedaris considers the hazards of rewards of smoking, writing for Giantess magazine, and living with his scrappy brother Paul, aka 'The Rooster'. With a perfect eye and a voice infused with as much empathy as wit, Sedaris writes and reads stories and essays that target the soulful ridiculousness of our behaviour. Barrel Fever is like a blind date with modern life - and anything can happen.
Download or read book Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules written by David Sedaris and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: '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'.
Download or read book Rants from the Hill written by Michael P. Branch and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 2017-06-06 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “If Thoreau drank more whiskey and lived in the desert, he’d write like this.”—High Country News Welcome to the land of wildfire, hypothermia, desiccation, and rattlers. The stark and inhospitable high-elevation landscape of Nevada’s Great Basin Desert may not be an obvious (or easy) place to settle down, but for self-professed desert rat Michael Branch, it’s home. Of course, living in such an unforgiving landscape gives one many things to rant about. Fortunately for us, Branch—humorist, environmentalist, and author of Raising Wild—is a prodigious ranter. From bees hiving in the walls of his house to owls trying to eat his daughters’ cat—not to mention his eccentric neighbors—adventure, humor, and irreverence abound on Branch’s small slice of the world, which he lovingly calls Ranting Hill.
Download or read book Theft by Finding written by David Sedaris and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2017-05-30 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Night of the Gun written by David Carr and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-12-11 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Carr was an addict for more than twenty years -- first dope, then coke, then finally crack -- before the prospect of losing his newborn twins made him sober up in a bid to win custody from their crack-dealer mother. Once recovered, he found that his recollection of his 'lost' years differed -- sometimes radically -- from that of his family and friends. The night, for example, his best friend pulled a gun on him. 'No,' said the friend (to David's horror, as a lifelong pacifist), 'It was you that had the gun.' Using all his skills as an investigative reporter, he set out to research his own life, interviewing everyone from his parents and his ex-partners to the policemen who arrested him, the doctors who treated him and the lawyers who fought to prove he was fit to have custody of his kids. Unflinchingly honest and beautifully written, the result is both a shocking account of the depths of addiction and a fascinating examination of how -- and why -- our memories deceive us. As David says, we remember the stories we can live with, not the ones that happened.
Download or read book The Best of Me written by David Sedaris and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2020-11-03 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What could be a more tempting Christmas gift than a compendium of David Sedaris's best stories, selected by the author himself? From a spectacular career spanning almost three decades, these stories have become modern classics and are now for the first time collected in one volume. 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 The Best 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.
Download or read book Holidays on Ice written by David Sedaris and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2009-05-04 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Sedaris's beloved holiday collection is new again with six more pieces, including a never before published story. Along with such favoritesas 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).
Download or read book Naked written by David Sedaris and published by Back Bay Books. This book was released on 2009-05-04 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Calypso C written by David Sedaris and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2018-05-29 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 writing has 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 tumour joke. Calypso is simultaneously Sedaris's darkest and warmest book yet - and it just might be his very best.
Download or read book The Book of My Lives written by Aleksandar Hemon and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2013-03-19 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award For fans of Aleksandar Hemon's fiction, The Book of My Lives is simply indispensable; for the uninitiated, it is the perfect introduction to one of the great writers of our time. Aleksandar Hemon's lives begin in Sarajevo, a small, blissful city where a young boy's life is consumed with street soccer with the neighborhood kids, resentment of his younger sister, and trips abroad with his engineer-cum-beekeeper father. Here, a young man's life is about poking at the pretensions of the city's elders with American music, bad poetry, and slightly better journalism. And then, his life in Chicago: watching from afar as war breaks out in Sarajevo and the city comes under siege, no way to return home; his parents and sister fleeing Sarajevo with the family dog, leaving behind all else they had ever known; and Hemon himself starting a new life, his own family, in this new city. And yet this is not really a memoir. The Bookof My Lives, Hemon's first book of nonfiction, defies convention and expectation. It is a love song to two different cities; it is a heartbreaking paean to the bonds of family; it is a stirring exhortation to go out and play soccer—and not for the exercise. It is a book driven by passions but built on fierce intelligence, devastating experience, and sharp insight. And like the best narratives, it is a book that will leave you a different reader—a different person, with a new way of looking at the world—when you've finished. A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2013
Download or read book A Carnival of Snackery written by David Sedaris and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 754 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book You Can t Say You Can t Play written by Vivian Gussin Paley and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1993-07-16 with total page 95 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who of us cannot remember the pain and humiliation of being rejected by our classmates? However thick-skinned or immune to such assaults we may become as adults, the memory of those early exclusions is as palpable to each of us today as it is common to human experience. We remember the uncertainty of separating from our home and entering school as strangers and, more than the relief of making friends, we recall the cruel moments of our own isolation as well as those children we knew were destined to remain strangers. In this book Vivian Paley employs a unique strategy to probe the moral dimensions of the classroom. She departs from her previous work by extending her analysis to children through the fifth grade, all the while weaving remarkable fairy tale into her narrative description. Paley introduces a new rule—“You can’t say you can’t play”—to her kindergarten classroom and solicits the opinions of older children regarding the fairness of such a rule. We hear from those who are rejected as well as those who do the rejecting. One child, objecting to the rule, says, “It will be fairer, but how are we going to have any fun?” Another child defends the principle of classroom bosses as a more benign way of excluding the unwanted. In a brilliant twist, Paley mixes fantasy and reality, and introduces a new voice into the debate: Magpie, a magical bird, who brings lonely people to a place where a full share of the sun is rightfully theirs. Myth and morality begin to proclaim the same message and the schoolhouse will be the crucible in which the new order is tried. A struggle ensues and even the Magpie stories cannot avoid the scrutiny of this merciless pack of social philosophers who will not be easily caught in a morality tale. You Can’t Say You Can’t Play speaks to some of our most deeply held beliefs. Is exclusivity part of human nature? Can we legislate fairness and still nurture creativity and individuality? Can children be freed from the habit of rejection? These are some of the questions. The answers are to be found in the words of Paley’s schoolchildren and in the wisdom of their teacher who respectfully listens to them.
