David Sedaris
All Books By David Sedaris
A Carnival of Snackery
- By: David Sedaris
- Narrator: David Sedaris
- Length: 17 hours 8 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: October 05, 2021
- Language: English
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4.21(9705 ratings)
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
Finalist for the Audie Award in Humor
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.
Barrel Fever and Other Stories
- By: David Sedaris
- Length: 3 hours 0 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: April 01, 2006
- Language: English
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3.79(194 ratings)
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.
Calypso
- By: David Sedaris
- Narrator: David Sedaris
- Length: 6 hours 39 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: May 29, 2018
- Language: English
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4.11(104406 ratings)
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.
David Sedaris
- By: David Sedaris
- Narrator: David Sedaris
- Length: 1 hours 14 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: April 01, 2005
- Language: English
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4(647280 ratings)
David Sedaris – 14 CD Boxed Set
- By: David Sedaris
- Length: 15 hours 16 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: February 06, 2007
- Language: English
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4.59(1824 ratings)
All of David Sedaris’ best in one box set! The set includes ME TALK PRETTY ONE DAY with a full hour of bonus tracks not available on cassette; NAKED; HOLIDAYS ON ICE; and BARREL FEVER AND OTHER STORIES. This timeless collection combines poignancy, humor, and the sparkling imagination of one of America’s best-loved humorists.
... Read moreDavid Sedaris: Live For Your Listening Pleasure
- By: David Sedaris
- Narrator: David Sedaris
- Length: 1 hours 14 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: November 24, 2009
- Language: English
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4.36(1680 ratings)
If you were lucky enough to have caught a performance on David Sedaris’s most recent sold-out, 34-city tour, you already know that David Sedaris Live For Your Listening Pleasure is a must-have album! If you didn’t hear it live and in person, then you’re in for a treat-hilarious brand-new recordings from performances in Denver, New York, Durham, LA, and Atlanta, in one convenient audiobook collection, on sale November 24 for only $17.98.
From the bold feral rabbits of his French backyard to the eating habits of a carnivorous bird Down Under, Live For Your Listening Pleasure takes listeners on a veritable tour of natural wonders, beginning with a fable, “Cat and Baboon,” and moving on to the peculiarly American habitat of the “big-box” store.
“Sedaris’s sparkling essays always shimmer more brightly when read aloud by the author. And his expert timing, mimicry and droll asides are never more polished than during live performances in front of an audience.” Publishers Weekly, Starred Review – When You Are Engulfed in Flames
Track Listing:
1: Cat and Baboon (Temple Hoyne Buell Theatre in Denver, Colorado)
2-5: Author, Author (Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City)
6-8: Innocence Abroad (Durham Performing Arts Center, in Durham, North Carolina)
9-13 Laugh, Kookaburra (Royce Hall, UCLA in Los Angeles, California)
14-16: Diary Entries (Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre in Atlanta, Georgia)
... Read moreDress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
- By: David Sedaris
- Narrator: David Sedaris
- Length: 6 hours 18 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: April 01, 2005
- Language: English
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4.1(253152 ratings)
Happy-Go-Lucky
- By: David Sedaris
- Narrator: David Sedaris
- Length: 7 hours 30 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: May 31, 2022
- Language: English
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4.23(21017 ratings)
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.
Holidays on Ice
- By: David Sedaris
- Narrator: David Sedaris
- Length: 4 hours 19 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: October 01, 2008
- Language: English
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3.9(108929 ratings)
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).
Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls
- By: David Sedaris
- Narrator: David Sedaris
- Length: 6 hours 25 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: April 23, 2013
- Language: English
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3.84(124314 ratings)
From the unique perspective of David Sedaris comes a new collection of essays taking his listeners on a bizarre and stimulating world tour. 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 are not to be forgotten.
Me Talk Pretty One Day
- By: David Sedaris
- Narrator: David Sedaris
- Length: 5 hours 51 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: April 01, 2006
- Language: English
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4(647280 ratings)
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
... Read moreNaked
- By: David Sedaris
- Narrator: Amy Sedaris
- Length: 3 hours 5 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: April 01, 2005
- Language: English
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4.09(251690 ratings)
Welcome to the hilarious, strange, elegiac, outrageous world of David Sedaris. In Naked, Sedaris turns the current mania for the memoir on its proverbial ear, mining the exceedingly rich terrain of his life, his family, and his unique worldview, a sensibility at once take-no-prisoners sharp and deeply charitable. A tart-tongued mother does dead-on imitations of her young son’s nervous tics, to the great amusement of his teachers; a stint of Kerouackian wandering is undertaken (of course!) with a quadriplegic companion. Through it all is Sedaris’s unmistakable voice, without a doubt one of the freshest in American writing.
... Read moreSquirrel Seeks Chipmunk
- By: David Sedaris
- Narrator: David Sedaris
- Length: 2 hours 3 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: September 28, 2010
- Language: English
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3.37(57889 ratings)
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.
The Best of Me
- By: David Sedaris
- Narrator: David Sedaris
- Length: 13 hours 8 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: November 03, 2020
- Language: English
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4.21(20997 ratings)
“Genius… It is miraculous to read these pieces… You must read The Best of Me.” —Andrew Sean Greer, New York Times Book Review
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 Understudy
Town and Country (live recording)
In the Waiting Room (live recording)
From The New Yorker
Undecided
From Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk 2010
The Cat and the Baboon (live recording)
The Motherless Bear (new recording)
The Faithful Setter (new recording)
From Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls 2013
Dentists Without Borders (live recording)
Memory Laps
Think Differenter (new recording)
Loggerheads
If I Ruled the World
Easy, Tiger
Laugh, Kookaburra (live recording)
Just a Quick e-Mail
A Guy Walks into a Bar Car
Standing By (live recording)
Understanding Understanding Owls
From Calypso 2019
Now We Are Five
A House Divided
The Perfect Fit
Leviathan
A Modest Proposal
Why Aren’t You Laughing?
The Spirit World
From The New Yorker:
Unbuttoned (new recording)
Audio Exclusive
Interview with Paul Constant (new recording)
Theft by Finding
- By: David Sedaris
- Narrator: David Sedaris
- Length: 13 hours 52 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: May 30, 2017
- Language: English
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3.94(26477 ratings)
One of the most anticipated books of 2017: Boston Globe, New York Times Book Review, New York‘s “Vulture”, The Week, Bustle, BookRiot
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.
When You Are Engulfed in Flames
- By: David Sedaris
- Narrator: David Sedaris
- Length: 9 hours 3 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: June 03, 2008
- Language: English
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4.07(193196 ratings)
Once again, David Sedaris brings together a collection of essays so uproariously funny and profoundly moving that his legions of fans will fall for him once more. He tests the limits of love when Hugh lances a boil from his backside, and pushes the boundaries of laziness when, finding the water shut off in his house in Normandy, he looks to the water in a vase of fresh cut flowers to fill the coffee machine. 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 (and never before published) account of his venture to Tokyo in order to quit smoking, David Sedaris’s sixth essay collection will be avidly anticipated.
... Read more