The Best of Me

by David Sedaris

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

David Sedaris is a unique talent. He's funny, a great observer of human nature, slightly neurotic and an excellent writer. The last part is what really comes out in this compendium of awesomeness that showcases Sedaris' best work over the past 25 years. It's hard to believe he has been at it this long and the mere act of culling through all the great stuff and picking "the best" was a difficult one. It's a great and funny journey though, and an excellent book to pick up and put down when you need a good laugh.

“Genius… It is miraculous to read these pieces… You must read The Best of Me.” —Andrew Sean Greer, New York Times Book Review

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. 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. Nowhere is this clearer than in    his writing about his loved ones. Here, 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.
 
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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316242400
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	09/07/2021
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	14,911
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

David Sedaris is the author of ten previous books, including, most recently, Calypso and Theft by Finding. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and BBC Radio 4. He lives in England and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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

Introduction 3

Glen's Homophobia Newsletter Vol. 3, No. 2 9

Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol 19

Christmas Means Giving 23

The Incomplete Quad 33

Girl Crazy 43

Card Wired 47

How to Spend the Budget Surplus 51

You Can't Kill the Rooster 55

Me Talk Pretty One Day 63

Jesus Shaves 69

Dog Days 75

Us and Them 79

Let It Snow 87

The Ship Shape 91

The Girl Next Door 101

Repeat After Me 115

Six to Eight Black Men 127

Possession 133

Nuit of the Living Dead 139

Solution to Saturday's Puzzle 149

The Understudy 157

Town and Country 169

In the Waiting Room 177

Undecided 185

The Cat and the Baboon 189

The Motherless Bear 193

The Faithful Setter 199

Dentists Without Borders 207

Memory Laps 213

Think Differenter 225

Loggerheads 229

If I Ruled the World 241

Easy, Tiger 245

Laugh, Kookaburra 253

Just a Quick E-mail 263

A Guy Walks into a Bar Car 267

Standing By 279

Understanding Understanding Owls 287

Now We Are Five 297

A House Divided 311

The Perfect Fit 323

Leviathan 333

A Modest Proposal 345

Why Aren't You Laughing? 353

The Spirit World 365

Unbuttoned 375

Editorial Reviews

The genius of The Best of Me is that it reveals the growth of a writer, a sense of how his outlook has changed and where he finds humor… The subject, in many of the pieces Sedaris has selected, is the judgment and pain we inflict on one another, and by ‘we’ Sedaris does not mean people in general. He means him. And he means you. And he means me… You must read The Best of Me. It will be a new experience, knowing that enough time has passed to find humor in the hardest parts of life. More than ever—we’re allowed to laugh.”—Andrew Sean Greer, New York Times Book Review

“An excellent introduction to Sedaris’ work if, somehow, you’re not among the millions who have made him a mainstay on bestseller lists and flocked to his ticketed readings. Even if you’ve read or listened to every word he’s ever written, it’s a terrific highlights reel and a chance to view the arc of Sedaris’ development as a writer over 25 years… In his more serious moments, Sedaris expresses surprise and gratitude for his good fortune. Even his father, “that perpetual human storm cloud,” has finally, in his late 90s, acknowledged his elder son’s fantastic accomplishments. The Best of Me is a well-earned victory lap.” —Heller McAlpin, Christian Science Monitor

“A comprehensive retrospective… The essayist collects his best stories spanning his career, from previously published volumes and magazine features.”—Barbara Vandenburgh, USA Today

“Sedaris fans will gobble up this greatest hits compilation… When you’re craving a good old-fashioned belly laugh, turn to this new retrospective collection of Sedaris’ funniest and most heartwarming essays and fictional stories written over the last 25-plus years.”—Lesley Kennedy, CNN

“The collection magnifies many of the attributes that have made Sedaris such a beloved writer, not least of which is the sense of wit... Across 46 stories and 400 pages, Sedaris’ clarity as a writer comes through. The pieces can be painfully funny and painfully poignant for the same reason: He’s economical with words, thoughts, jokes and emotions.”—Andrew Dansby, Houston Chronicle

“If you’re looking for some comic relief, look no further than David Sedaris.” —Tonya Mosley, NPR

“Longtime fans and astute readers will understand that the title doesn’t refer entirely to the author; he has chosen and arranged works to highlight his funny, often dysfunctional and always loving parents, siblings and partner, Hugh—the people he believes are the best of him.”—Bethanne Patrick, Washington Post

“The Best of Me encompasses a wide swath of his past work, from early entries in The New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmurs section to fan-favorite essays like 2000’s ‘Me Talk Pretty One Day’ (in which he recounts taking French-language classes from a merciless teacher) and 2016’s ‘The Perfect Fit’ (about shopping for outrageous clothes in Tokyo).” —Seija Rankin, Entertainment Weekly

“Sedaris’s brilliant knack for observational humor is on full display in this terrific retrospective essay collection… 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 and evoke both empathy and laughter. He can also be just plain hilarious… This is the perfect introduction for the uninitiated, while Sedaris’s fans will enjoy rediscovering old favorites.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A generous and rollicking collection… Sedaris is a fun, wickedly funny companion. But for all his playful irreverence… he also brings a sharp moral eye to his subjects—which tend toward the eclectic. Writing about everything from family tragedy to international travel to taxidermied owls, he illuminates the manifold wonders (and weirdness) of everyday life. For those new to Sedaris’s work, this book will serve as a delightful introduction. For longtime fans, it will offer a familiar comfort, like catching up with an old friend.”—Cornelia Channing, Vulture

From the Publisher

★ 09/21/2020

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. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 2020-11-08
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 mélange 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.

Kirkus Reviews