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In Naked, David Sedaris's message - alternately rendered in "Fakespeare", Italian, Spanish, and pidgin Greek - is the same: pay attention to me. Whether he's taking to the road with a thieving quadriplegic, sorting out the fancy from the extra-fancy in a bleak fruit-packing factory, or celebrating Christmas in the company of a recently paroled prostitute, this collection of memoirs creates a wickedly incisive portrait of an all-too-familiar world. It takes Sedaris from his humiliating bout with obsessive behavior in "A Plague of Tics" to the title story, in which he is finally forced to face his naked self in the mirrored sunglasses of a lunatic. At this soulful and moving moment, he picks potato chip crumbs from his pubic hair and wonders what it all means. This remarkable journey into his own life follows a path of self-effacement and a lifelong search for identity, leaving him both under suspicion and overdressed.

"In this collection of essays, playwright and NPR commentator Sedaris tops his anarchically hilarious miscellany 'Barrel Fever' (1994) by inventing a new genre: autobiography as fun-house mirror. From the first sentence ('I'm thinking of asking the servants to wax my change before placing it in the Chinese tank in keep on my dresser"), 'Naked' pretty well clobbers the reader into dizzy submission. Sedaris applies the same deadpan fastidiousness to his life that Charlie Chaplin applied to his shoe in 'The Gold Rush'--this is splendid stuff."

Kirkus, 01/15/97

"While Sedaris certainly plays his family's eccentricities for laughs...he's just as clearly celebrating them, too....This is Sedaris' gift, to capture the language of intimate humor, and in so doing to strip family life to its naked components: anger, fear, and love."

Kate Tuttle, Boston Book Review, March 1997

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