Me Talk Pretty One Day

This vibrant collection of expat essays from legendary humorist David Sedaris is a cause for jubiliation.

Sedaris's move to Paris in the early aughts inspired hilarious pieces, such as "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 is one of America's best-loved authors, and his biting essays on living in Paris are some of the funniest he's 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 a love child.

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

"It's a pretty grim world when I can't even feel superior to a toddler." Welcome to the curious mind of David Sedaris, where dogs outrank children, guitars have breasts, and French toddlers unmask the inadequacies of the American male. Sedaris inhabits this world as a misanthrope chronicling all things petty and small. In Me Talk Pretty One Day Sedaris is as determined as ever to be nobody's hero--he never triumphs, he never conquers--and somehow, with each failure, he inadvertently becomes everybody's favorite underdog. The world's most eloquent malcontent, Sedaris has turned self-deprecation into a celebrated art form--one that is perhaps best experienced in audio. "Go Carolina," his account of "the first battle of my war against the letter s" is particularly poignant. Unable to disguise the lisp that has become his trademark, Sedaris highlights (to hilarious extent) the frustration of reading "childish s-laden texts recounting the adventures of seals or settlers named Sassy or Samuel." Including 23 of the book version's 28 stories, two live performances complete with involuntary laughter, and an uncannily accurate Billie Holiday impersonation, the audio is more than a companion to the text; it stands alone as a performance piece--only without the sock monkeys. (Running time: 5 hours, 4 cassettes) --Daphne Durham