"David Sedaris is hilarious and Vincent Van Gogh is a fantastic artist so even you only judge this book by its cover it's a pretty good book. The inside, in my professional opinion, lives up to the expectations the cover has set.
My favorite essay involves a human skeleton and talks of death, which if you know me are subjects I hold to a very high standard of excellence and intrigue.
Being in Davis Sedaris' head with his neurosis feels a bit like being in mine if I was older and a guy and grew up in not Cambridge. I know that sounds really weird, but he is able to put in to words things I think, but in smart clever ways that I could never come up with."
Publisher Back Bay Books
Publication Date 2009-06-02
Section Essays / Humor / All Staff Suggestions / Nonfiction Suggestions / Emmaline C.
Format Paperback
ISBN 9780316154680
"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
