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Item Barcode | Collection | Call Number | Status | Item Holds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 33607002583139 | Adult Fiction | SEDARIS | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
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Summary
Summary
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 ).
Author Notes
David Sedaris was born in Binghamton, New York on December 26, 1956, but he grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. Much of Sedaris' humor is autobiographical and self-deprecating, and it often concerns his family life, his middle class upbringing in the suburbs of North Carolina. He graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1987. He is a popular radio commentator, essayist, and short story writer. He held many part-time and odd jobs before getting a job reading excerpts from his diaries on National Public Radio in 1992.
His first collection of essays and short stories, Barrel Fever, was published in 1994. His other works include Naked, Holidays on Ice, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary, Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977-2002), and Calypso. Me Talk Pretty One Day won the Thurber Prize for American Humor in 2001. He has also written several plays with his sister Amy Sedaris including Stump the Host, Stitches, and The Little Frieda Mysteries. In 2014 her title, Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls, made The New York Times Best Seller List.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Here are six Christmas tales sure to please readers new to humorist, playwright and NPR commentator Sedaris‘and likely to disappoint his devotees. The three best pieces are reprints from his earlier collections, Barrel Fever and Naked. In "Dinah, the Christmas Whore," young David's 18-year-old sister befriends a prostitute and brings her home one night during Christmas vacation. In "Season's Greetings," a housewife facing homicide charges keeps her loved ones up-to-date on the case in a detailed Christmas missive. In the hilarious "SantaLand Diaries," Sedaris relives his short career as a Macy's department-store elf. In this memoir, the flagship of the collection, we see Sedaris at his wide-eyed best as he takes the SantaLand name of Crumpet, falls for an elf-Casanova named Snowball (as do "three Santas and five other elves") and discovers the seamy underside of the Christmas industry. Compared to the fully realized "Diaries," his three new sketches look very thin indeed: a splenetic theater critic pans the season's local school pageants; a TV producer tries to convince an Appalachian congregation to let him buy the weird life story of one of its members; two grasping, well-to-do families sacrifice everything, including non-vital organs, to out-give each other at Christmas. Sedaris never makes these one-liners pay off. Still, flashes of his customary brilliance, particularly as the critic ("In the role of Mary, six-year-old Shannon Burke just barely manages to pass herself off as a virgin"), will keep this too-slim gift book from disappointing neophytes who find it in their stockings. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Library Journal Review
Since the first edition has sold over 800,000 copies in ten years, it's probably smart to update it with six new stories. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.