Happy-Go-Lucky

Happy-Go-Lucky

by David Sedaris
Happy-Go-Lucky

Happy-Go-Lucky

by David Sedaris

Hardcover

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Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Oh, Mr. Sedaris, how we’ve missed you! Your 2020 anthology, Best of Me, and 2021 diary title, A Carnival of Snackery, kept the conversation going and hanging on your every story. But now, new adventures from you! We are happy-go-lucky to have your new work on our bookshelves.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780316392457
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Publication date: 05/31/2022
Pages: 272
Sales rank: 80,945
Product dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

David Sedaris is the author of twelve previous books, including, most recently, A Carnival of Snackery, The Best of Me, and Calypso. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and BBC Radio 4. In 2019, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the recipient of the Thurber Prize for American Humor, the Jonathan Swift International Literature Prize for Satire and Humor, and the Terry Southern Prize for Humor.

Hometown:

London, England

Date of Birth:

December 26, 1956

Place of Birth:

Johnson City, New York

Education:

B.F.A., School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1987

Table of Contents

Active Shooter 3

Father Time 17

Bruised 33

A Speech to the Graduates 47

Hurricane Season 55

Highfalutin 73

Unbuttoned 87

Themes and Variations 105

To Serbia with Love 123

The Vacuum 139

Pearls 153

Fresh-Caught Haddock 163

Happy-Go-Lucky 179

A Better Place 193

Lady Marmalade 197

Smile, Beautiful 213

Pussytoes 227

Lucky-Go-Happy 243

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