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20 Free Essays & Stories by David Sedaris: A Sampling of His Inimitable Humor

in Comedy , Literature | September 15th, 2014 6 Comments

My first exposure to the writing of David Sedaris came fifteen years ago, at a reading he gave in Seattle. I couldn’t remember laughing at anything before quite so hard as I laughed at the stories of the author and his fellow French-learners struggling for a grasp on the language. I fought hardest for oxygen when he got to the part about his classmates, a veritable United Nations of a group, straining in this non-native language of theirs to discuss various holidays. One particular line has always stuck with me, after a Moroccan student demands an explanation of Easter:

The Poles led the charge to the best of their ability. “It is,” said one, “a party for the little boy of God who call his self Jesus and… oh, shit.” She faltered, and her fellow countryman came to her aid. “He call his self Jesus, and then he be die one day on two… morsels of… lumber.”

The scene eventually ended up in print in “Jesus Shaves,” a story in Sedaris’ third collection, Me Talk Pretty One Day . You can read it free online in a selection of three of his pieces rounded up by Esquire . Sedaris’ observational humor does tend to come out in full force on holidays (see also his reading of the Saint Nicholas-themed story “Six to Eight Black Men” on Dutch television above), and indeed the holidays provided him the material that first launched him into the mainstream.

When Ira Glass, the soon-to-be mastermind of This American Life , happened to hear him reading his diary aloud at a Chicago club, Glass knew he simply had to put this man on the radio. This led up to the big break of a National Public Radio broadcast of “The Santaland Diaries,” Sedaris’ rich account of a season spent as a Macy’s elf. You can still hear This American Life ’s full broadcast of it on the show’s site .

True Sedarians, of course, know him for not just his inimitably askew perspective on the holidays, but for his accounts of life in New York, Paris (the reason he enrolled in those French classes in the first place), Normandy, London, the English countryside, and growing up amid his large Greek-American family. Many of Sedaris’ stories — 20 in fact — have been collected at the web site, The Electric Typewriter , giving you an overview of Sedaris’ world: his time in the elfin trenches, his rare moments of ease among siblings and parents, his futile father-mandated guitar lessons, his less futile language lessons, his relinquishment of his signature smoking habit (the easy indulgence of which took him, so he’d said at that Seattle reading, to France in the first place). Among the collected stories, you will find:

“The Santaland Diaries” (audio)
“The Youth in Asia,” “Jesus Shaves,” and “Giant Dreams, Midget Abilities”
“Our Perfect Summer”
“Letting Go”
“Now We Are Five”

For the complete list, visit: 20 Great Essays and Short Stories by David Sedaris . And, just to be clear, you can read these stories, for free, online.

Note: If you would like to download a free audiobook narrated by David Sedaris , you might want to check out Audible’s 30 Day Free Trial. We have details on the program here . If you click this link , you will see the books narrated by Sedaris. If one intrigues, click on the “Learn how to get this Free” link next to each book.

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25 great essays and short stories by david sedaris, you can't kill the rooster, us and them, go carolina, it's catching, our perfect summer, old lady down the hall, the man who mistook his hat for a meal, now we are five, laugh, kookaburra, journey into night, the santaland diaries, when you are engulfed in flames, company man, the shadow of your smile, my finances, in brief, why aren’t you laughing by david sedaris, see also..., 150 great articles and essays.

Relationships

Guy walks into a bar car, old faithful, six to eight black men, understanding owls, in the waiting room, wildflowers and weed, dentists without borders, undecided voters, me talk pretty one day, dress your family in corduroy and denim.

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It’s July in West Sussex, and I’m at a garden party, talking with a lawyer who has two sons in their early twenties. The oldest is living in Scotland, and the other, a sullen college student, is home for the month, tearing everyone’s head off. “So, do you have children?” she asks.

“Oh, no,” I tell her. “Not yet anyway. But I am in a relationship.”

She says that she is glad to hear it.

“My boyfriend will turn twenty-one this coming Wednesday,” I continue, “and you are so right about the moodiness of young men his age. I mean, honestly, what do they have to be so angry about?”

I do this all the time—tell people misleading things about Hugh. It’s fun watching them shift gears as they reëvaluate who they think I am. Sometimes I say that he’s been blind since birth or is a big shot in the right-to-life movement, but the best is when he’s forty-plus years my junior.

“Well . . . good for you,” people say, while thinking, I’m pretty sure, That poor boy! Because it’s creepy, that sort of age difference—vampiric.

“There’s a formula for dating someone younger than you,” my friend Aaron in Seattle once told me. “The cutoff,” he explained, “is your age divided by two plus seven.” At the time, I was fifty-nine, meaning that the youngest I could go, new-boyfriend-wise, was thirty-six and a half. That’s not a jaw-dropping difference, but, although it might seem tempting, there’d be a lot that someone under forty probably wouldn’t know, like who George Raft was, or what hippies smelled like. And, little by little, wouldn’t those gaps add up, and leave you feeling even older than you actually are?

It’s true that Hugh is younger than me, but only by three years. Still, I thought he’d never reach sixty. Being there by myself—officially old, the young part of old, but old, nevertheless—was no fun at all. C’mon, I kept thinking. Hurry it along. His birthday is in late January, which makes him an Aquarian. This means nothing to me, though my sister is trying her damnedest to change that. Amy’s astrologer predicted that Biden would win the 2020 Presidential election, and when he did she offered it as proof that Rakesh has extraordinary powers and thus deserves not just my respect but my business.

“You have to make an appointment and at least talk to him,” she said.

“No, I don’t,” I told her. “I mean, my dry cleaner predicted the same thing. Lots of people did.”

I’m a Capricorn, and according to the astrologer Lisa Stardust my least compatible signs for dating are Aries and Leo. My best bets are Cancers, Scorpios, and Pisceans.

I haven’t looked at what astrological signs Hugh should avoid going out with, mainly because it’s irrelevant. Not long after he turned sixty-one, we celebrated our thirtieth anniversary. Will we make it to thirty-five years? To fifty? Either way, do I really need to hear about it from Rakesh?

My mother became interested in astrology in the nineteen-eighties. She wasn’t a kook about it; she simply started reading the horoscopes in the Raleigh News & Observer . “Things are going to improve for you financially on the seventeenth,” she’d say over the phone, early in the morning if the prediction was sunny and she thought it might brighten my day. “A good deal of money is coming your way, but with a slight hitch.”

“Oh, no!” I’d say. “Are you dying?” I thought it was hooey, but in the back of my mind a little light would always go on. I guess what I felt was hope—my life would change, and for the better! The seventeenth would come and go, and, although I’d be disappointed, I would also feel vindicated: “I told you I wouldn’t find happiness.”

She never had her chart done, my mother, but she did branch out and start reading the horoscopes in Redbook , and in Ladies’ Home Journal , a magazine that had come to our home for as long as I could remember. The only column in it that interested me, the only one I regularly read, was called “Can This Marriage Be Saved?”

You could have taken everything I knew about long-term relationships back then and fitted it into an acorn cap. I thought that, in order to last, you and your wife or boyfriend or whatever had to have a number of mutual interests. They didn’t need to be profound. Camping would qualify, or découpaging old milk cans. The surprise is that sometimes all it takes is a mutual aversion to overhead lights, or to turning the TV on before 11 P.M. You like to be on time and keep things tidy, the other person’s the same, and the next thing you know thirty years have passed and people are begging you to share your great wisdom. “First off,” I say, “never, under any circumstances, look under the hood of your relationship. It can only lead to trouble.” Counselling, I counsel, is the first step to divorce.

I’ve thought of that Ladies’ Home Journal column a lot lately, wondering if marital problems in the seventies and eighties weren’t all fairly basic: She’s an alcoholic. He’s been sleeping with his sister-in-law. She’s a spendthrift and a racist, he’s a control freak, etc.

No couple argued over which gender their child should be allowed to identify as; no one’s husband or wife got sucked into QAnon or joined a paramilitary group. Sure, there were conspiracy theories, but in those pre-Internet days it was harder to submerge yourself in them. A spouse might have been addicted to Valium, but not to video games, or online gambling. I don’t know that one can technically be addicted to pornography, but that’s bound to put a strain on marriages, especially now, when it’s at your fingertips, practically daring you not to look at it.

I’ve watched a number of movies and TV shows lately in which the characters’ marriages dissolve for no real reason. I said to Hugh during “Ted Lasso,” “Did I miss the episode where he or his wife had an affair?” The same was true of Noah Baumbach’s “Marriage Story”: “ Why are they getting a divorce?”

Don’t people who feel vaguely unfulfilled in their relationships just have too much time on their hands? Decide that you need to discover your true, independent self and the next thing you know you’ll be practicing Reiki or visiting an iridologist. That, I’ve learned, is someone who looks deep into your eyes and can see your internal organs. My sister Amy went to one, who told her that she had something stuck in her colon.

She took the diagnosis to her acupuncturist, who said that, actually, what the iridologist had seen in my sister’s eyes was trauma.

Amy said, “Trauma?”

He said, “Remember you told me you saw a mouse and a water bug in your kitchen one day last month?”

She said, “Yes.”

He said, “That’s trauma.”

My sister is not dating anyone—a good thing, as she’s got way too much time on her hands. And that, I think, is the No. 1 reason so many relationships fail. Too much free time, and too much time together. I’m normally away from Hugh between four and six months a year, and when the pandemic cancelled the tours I had scheduled I panicked. We were in New York at the time, so I sought out his old friend Carol. “What’s he really like?” I asked her. “I think I sort of knew once, but that was twenty-five years ago.”

Trapped together for months on end, I learned that Hugh, a painter, reads a lot. Like, every word of the Times , the Washington Post , and The New York Review of Books . Oddly, though, he doesn’t seem to retain much. Whenever guests came to dinner, and the talk turned to politics, Hugh, who might have delivered an informed opinion on, for example, Trump’s proposed withdrawal from the W.H.O., would say, “I think we should line them all up and shoot them.”

“Shoot who?” I’d ask, though I knew the answer.

“All the jerks who think we should withdraw.”

That’s his family’s most damning epithet: jerk. “Yes, well, that’s not going to happen,” I’d tell him. “It’s not a real solution to the problem.”

“Then I don’t want to talk about it.”

When not reading or cooking, Hugh goes to his studio and stares out the window, high on paint fumes, I’m guessing. I’ve never known anyone who can stand still for as long as he does, moving nothing but his eyes, which shift back and forth like a cat’s on one of those plastic wall clocks where the swinging tail is the pendulum. He doesn’t listen to music while he’s in there, or to the radio. Once, I put on a recording of Eudora Welty reading a number of her short stories, and, though he claimed to enjoy it, after “Petrified Man” he said he didn’t want to hear any more. He likes to be alone with his thoughts, but me, I can’t think of anything worse.

When not reading or cooking or staring out his window at nothing, Hugh practices piano. He started taking lessons on a rented upright when he was ten, and living in Ethiopia, but his father couldn’t bear to hear him practice. He wasn’t particularly inept, but noise, any noise, bothered his dad, a novelist with a day job as a diplomat. Then the family moved to Somalia, where pianos were hard to come by, not to mention piano teachers, and his father wrote another book.

After a fifty-year break, Hugh started taking lessons again, this time on a baby grand a friend gave him, and, though he’s really committed, it always sounds to me like he just started last week. “I can’t play when you’re in the room,” he told me. “I feel judged.”

Then he decided that he couldn’t play when I was in the apartment.

And so we bought the apartment upstairs from us.

“So that you’ll have somewhere to go when he practices piano ?” asked Amy, who bought the apartment upstairs from her just so she could get away from her rabbit.

“Exactly,” I told her.

“Makes sense,” she said.

I’m up there all the time now. We have no interior staircase connecting the two places, so Hugh e-mails me when he’s got news. “Lunch is ready.” “The super is here to fix your closet door.” That type of thing. We took ownership just as New York went into lockdown, and furniture deliveries were banned in our building. Luckily, the previous owner agreed to leave a sofa and a bed. I found a few chairs on the street, a folding table, a bucket I could overturn and use as a footstool. For months, it looked like a twelve-year-old’s clubhouse. Not that we didn’t both spend time there. Hugh can do everything upstairs that he does downstairs except practice piano. We call the second apartment Luigi’s. “Will we be having dinner on the nineteenth floor or up at Luigi’s?”

Luigi’s, we decided, is for casual dining.

Eventually we moved our bedroom to the second apartment. After thirty years together, sleeping is the new having sex. “That was amazing, wasn’t it!” one or the other of us will say upon waking in the morning.

“I held you in the night.”

“No, I held you! ”

“You kids think you invented sleep,” I can imagine my mother saying.

But didn’t we ? Hugh and I try new positions. (“You got drool on my calf!”) We engage in quickies (naps). Three times a week I change the sheets so that our bed will feel like one in a nice hotel. Pulling back the comforter, we look like a couple in a detergent commercial. “Smell the freshness!”

For a thirtieth anniversary, you’re supposed to offer pearls, but instead, for roughly the same price, I went to the Porthault shop on Park Avenue and got Hugh a set of sheets. The “Fabric Care” section on the company’s Web site reads, in part, “Do not overload the dryer, as your linens need room to dance.”

How did we become these people? I wonder.

Hugh says that if we ever get separate bedrooms that’s it—he’s finished. I know this works for a lot of couples, they’re happy being down the hall from each other, but I couldn’t bear such an arrangement. “This is what I’ll miss after you’re dead,” I tell him as I turn out the light, meaning, I guess, the sensation of being dead together.

Hugh might be a mystery to me, but it’s a one-way street. “I’m sorry,” I’ll often say to him.

“That’s all right.”

“What was I apologizing for?” I’ll ask.

“Telling the doorman that my mother looks like Hal Holbrook,” he’ll say, or “Wishing I would get COVID just so you could write about it.”

He nails it every time! I didn’t need to tell him that after we’re all vaccinated and theatres reopen he will never see me again. “I’ve asked my agent to book me solid—I’ll do three hundred and sixty-five shows in a row, take a night off, and then start all over again,” I said. “I want to make up for lost time, and then some.”

He accuses me of being money-hungry, and I wish it were that simple. Honestly, it’s the attention I’m after.

“What about me?” he asks. “Doesn’t my attention matter?”

I say that he doesn’t count, though of course he’s one of a handful of people in my life—along with my sisters, my cousins, and a couple of old friends—who actually do count. I just don’t necessarily need him by my side every moment that I’m awake. Sometimes it’s enough to press my ear against the living-room floor of the upstairs apartment, and faintly hear him practicing piano down below, frowning at the keys, I suspect, and at the music before him, a boy again. So determined to get it right. ♦

What Does Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Actually Want?

The Sneaky, Subversive Thrills of David Sedaris

The chronicler of dysfunctional families and oddball enthusiasms returns with a new essay collection, “Happy-Go-Lucky.”

Credit... Vincent Tullo for The New York Times

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By Henry Alford

Published May 30, 2022 Updated June 22, 2023
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HAPPY-GO-LUCKY , by David Sedaris

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In the past five years, David Sedaris has published seven books — two essay collections; an anthology; two diaries, both more than 500 pages long; a visual compendium to the diaries; and an ebook version of an essay. Can an eponymous fragrance be far in the offing? (“Se- daring. For the imp in you.”)

Depending on your point of view, this onslaught — particularly given that Sedaris likes to revisit scenarios that he’s already written about — may strike you as either overgenerous or delightful. I fall into the latter camp, partly because “retention” is merely a word to me, and partly because I hold that the essential trait of a literary classic is that it is so textured that one can reread it and usually find something new.

Sedaris’s last collection, “Calypso,” practically destroyed me. Between the accounts of his troubled sister Tiffany, who died by suicide, and those of his father, who was begrudging and abusive to Sedaris throughout his life, I welled with tears four times. I chuckled frequently and projectile-laughed once. Most contemporary comic essayists have honed their powers of self-deprecation into excoriating, and sometimes exhausting, laser beams, but Sedaris is often willing to apply this same level of scrutiny to other people as well — and to do it without being nasty. For readers this can be eye-widening, and sometimes exciting, and surely is part of what makes Sedaris’s work such a sneaky, subversive thrill. Whether he’s detailing how his father, Lou, liked to eat food that he’d hidden around the house until it rotted, or he’s going off on homeless people in Portland, Sedaris dispenses with the parameters of You Can’t Say That like a tween boy scorching ants with a magnifying glass.

In my favorite type of Sedaris essay — the kind I’ll keep rereading — the author takes an unusual or taboo topic, such as death or incontinence, and then shows us how a group of flawed characters including himself circle around that topic; but then, in the last paragraph or two, he unleashes a blast of tenderness or humanity that catches you off guard. Take the new collection’s offering “Hurricane Season,” which, mostly set at Sedaris and his boyfriend Hugh’s beach houses in North Carolina, is about how spending time with our families can cause us to re-examine our relationships with our partners. Sedaris knows that his siblings are sometimes put off by Hugh: Each of them, at some point, has asked Sedaris, “What is his problem? ” Hugh, the guardian of manners and tradition among the wild-eyed and heathen Sedarii, is not afraid to snap or dole out punishment when one of them wears a down coat to the dinner table, or calls his chairs rickety, or feeds candy to ants. (Sedaris, the candyman, writes, “Gretchen patted my hand. ‘Don’t listen to Hugh. He doesn’t know [expletive] about being an ant.’”) But by essay’s end we find Hugh, after one of his and Sedaris’s houses is all but destroyed by Hurricane Florence, holed up in the bedroom, sobbing, his face in his hands, his shoulders quaking. We learn that three of the houses Hugh grew up in had also been destroyed. In such moments, Sedaris’s family has no jurisdiction: “They see me getting scolded from time to time, getting locked out of my own house, but where are they in the darkening rooms when a close friend dies or rebels storm the embassy? When the wind picks up and the floodwaters rise? When you realize you’d give anything to make that other person stop hurting, if only so he can tear your head off again?”

“Happy-Go-Lucky” has fewer of these beautifully crafted jewel boxes than “Calypso” did. However, in addition to being consistently funny, it contains some festive Sedaris occasions for all those who celebrate. We get a seeming resolution to Sedaris and his father’s lifelong grudge match when Lou tells David, “You won.” We get vivid moments featuring Lou’s will and Tiffany’s accusations of sexual abuse; Sedaris confesses to offering to pay for a 24-year-old store clerk to have his teeth fixed, and to long ago initiating a bizarre intergenerational family moment while wearing underpants that he’d cut the back out of. We also get the only truly offensive thing, to my knowledge, that Sedaris has ever written: “I cannot bear watching my sisters get old. It just seems cruel. They were all such beauties.”

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Happy-Go-Lucky

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.

Buy "Happy-Go-Lucky"

About david sedaris.

David Sedaris is the bestselling author of the books Calypso, Theft By Finding , Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Holidays on Ice, Naked, and Barrel Fever . He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and BBC Radio 4.

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September 21 / 2024 / Volkhaus

Zurich, Switzerland / 7:00PM

September 23 / 2024 / Chateau Neuf

Oslo, Norway / 7:00PM

September 24 / 2024 / Oscarsteatern

Stockholm, Sweden / 7:00PM

September 27 / 2024 / Spruce Peak Performing Arts Center, night 1

Stowe, VT / 7:00PM

September 28 / 2024 / Spruce Peak Performing Arts Center, night 2

September 30 / 2024 / Shubert Theatre

New Haven, CT / 7:30PM

October 1 / 2024 / Shea Center for the Performing Arts at William Patterson University

Wayne, NJ / 7:30PM

October 2 / 2024 / Massey Hall

Toronto, CAN / 7:30PM

October 3 / 2024 / McCarter Theatre

Princeton, NJ / 7:30PM

October 4 / 2024 / The Performing Arts Center, Purchase College

Purchase, NY / 8:00PM

October 5 / 2024 / Guild Hall

East Hampton, NY / 7:30PM

October 6 / 2024 / Patchogue Theatre

Patchogue, NY / 7:00PM

October 8 / 2024 / Bushnell Mortensen Hall

Hartford, CT / 7:30PM

October 9 / 2024 / University of Florida Phillips Center for the Performing Arts

Gainesville, FL / 7:30PM

October 10 / 2024 / Parker Playhouse

Ft. Lauderdale, FL / 7:30PM

October 11 / 2024 / River Center

Baton Rouge, LA / 8:00PM

October 12 / 2024 / Ovens Auditorium

Charlotte, NC / 8:00PM

October 13 / 2024 / Gaillard Center

Charleston, SC / 2:00PM

October 14 / 2024 / The Avalon Theatre

Easton, MD / 7:00PM

October 15 / 2024 / The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts

Washington, D.C. / 8:00PM

October 16 / 2024 / Hershey Theatre

Hershey, PA / 7:30PM

October 17 / 2024 / Millsaps Recital Hall

Jackson, MS / 7:30PM

October 18 / 2024 / Night 1, Terry Theatre

Jacksonville, FL / 8:00PM

October 19 / 2024 / Night 2, Terry Theatre

October 20 / 2024 / Hudiburg Chevrolet Center

Midwest City, OK / 7:00PM

October 21 / 2024 / Lexington Opera House

Lexington, KY / 7:30PM

October 22 / 2024 / Peabody Opera House

St. Louis, MO / 7:30PM

October 23 / 2024 / Raue Center for the Arts

Crystal Lake, IL / 7:00PM

October 24 / 2024 / Stephens Auditorium

Ames, IA / 7:30PM

October 25 / 2024 / Springfield Greene County Library Foundation, Gillioz Theatre

Springfield, MO / 7:00PM

October 27 / 2024 / Victory Theatre

Evansville, IN / 7:00PM

October 28 / 2024 / Orpheum Theatre

Wichita, KS / 7:30PM

October 29 / 2024 / Cullen Theatre

Houston, TX / 7:30PM

October 30 / 2024 / Tobin Center for the Performing Arts

San Antonio, TX / 7:30PM

November 1 / 2024 / Steven Tanger Center for the Performing Arts

Greensboro, NC / 8:00PM

November 2 / 2024 / Raleigh Memorial Auditorium

Raleigh, NC / 8:00PM

November 3 / 2024 / Wortham Center

Asheville, NC (Night 1) / 3:00PM

November 4 / 2024 / Wortham Center

Asheville, NC (Night 2) / 7:00PM

November 6 / 2024 / Hennepin Arts

Minneapolis, MN / 7:30PM

November 8 / 2024 / Arlene Schnitzer Hall

Portland, OR / 7:30PM

November 9 / 2024 / Mount Baker Theatre

Bellingham, WA / 7:30PM

November 10 / 2024 / Benaroya Hall

Seattle, WA / 7:00PM

November 11 / 2024 / Argyros Performing Arts Center presented by Sun Valley Museum of Art

Ketchum, ID / 7:30PM

November 12 / 2024 / Pikes Peak Center

Colorado Springs, CO / 7:30PM

November 14 / 2024 / Ellen Eccles Theatre

Logan, UT / 7:00PM

November 15 / 2024 / Popejoy Hall presented by UMN Public Events

Albuquerque, NM / 7:30PM

November 16 / 2024 / United Theater on Broadway

Los Angeles, CA / 7:30PM

November 19 / 2024 / The Center for the Arts

Grass Valley, CA / 7:30PM

November 20 / 2024 / The Capitol Theatre

Yakima, WA / 7:00PM

November 21 / 2024 / Tower Theatre

Bend, OR (Night 1) / 7:00PM

November 22 / 2024 / Tower Theatre

Bend, OR (Night 2) / 7:00PM

January 31 / 2025 / The Great Hall

Auckland, NZ / 7:00PM

February 1 / 2025 / Canberra Theatre Centre

Canberra, AUS / 7:30PM

February 2 / 2025 / Regal Theatre

Perth, AUS / 7:00PM

February 4 / 2025 / Norwood Concert Hall

Adelaide, AUS / 7:00PM

February 6 / 2025 / Hamer Hall

Melbourne, AUS / 7:30PM

February 7 / 2025 / Hamer Hall

February 8 / 2025 / Newcastle City Hall

Newcastle, AUS / 7:00PM

February 10 / 2025 / Sydney Opera House

Sydney, AUS / 7:00PM

February 11 / 2025 / Sydney Opera House

February 13 / 2025 / Brisbane Powerhouse

Brisbane, AUS / 7:00PM

February 14 / 2025 / Brisbane Powerhouse

March 30 / 2025 / The Colonial Theatre

Keene, NH / 7:00PM

April 1 / 2025 / Tupelo Music Hall

Derry, NH / 8:00PM

April 25 / 2025 / Fort Lewis College Community Concert Hall

Durango, CO / 7:30PM

May 8 / 2025 / Balboa Theatre

San Diego, CA / 7:30PM

Listen to a David Sedaris Excerpt

IMAGES

David Sedaris' Essay "Us and Them" Anticipation Guide and Study Guide
"Us and Them" by David Sedaris Close Reading Worksheet
David Sedaris' Essay "Us and Them" 20-Question Matching and Multiple Choice Quiz
Book review: David Sedaris packages personal best for essay collection
5 of David Sedaris' Funniest Essays
“My Finances, in Brief,” an Essay by David Sedaris

COMMENTS

20 Free Essays & Stories by David Sedaris: A Sampling of His ...
Be His Guest: David Sedaris at Home in Rural West Sussex, England. David Sedaris Reads You a Story By Miranda July. David Sedaris and Ian Falconer Introduce “Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk”. David Sedaris Sings the Oscar Mayer Theme Song in the Voice of Billie Holiday.
7 essays that every David Sedaris fan should read - Mashable
7 essays that every David Sedaris fan should read. Some personal favorites from a long, storied career. By MJ Franklin, Marcus Gilmer and Martha Tesema on May 29, 2018. David Sedaris has...
25 Great Essays and Short Stories by David Sedaris - Tumblr
25 Great Essays and Short Stories by David Sedaris. The funniest memoir writing, articles, essays and short stories and from the master of observational humour, all free to read online.
Now We Are Five | The New Yorker
David Sedaris has contributed to The New Yorker since 1995. His most recent essay collection is “Happy-Go-Lucky.”
“Lucky-Go-Happy,” a New Essay by David Sedaris
David Sedaris describes his return to touring: The America I saw in the fall of 2021 was weary and battle-scarred. Its sidewalks were cracked, its mailboxes bashed in.
“Pearls,” a New Essay by David Sedaris | The New Yorker
After thirty years together, sleeping is the new having sex. By David Sedaris. May 10, 2021. For a thirtieth anniversary, you’re supposed to offer pearls, but sheets felt right. Illustration by...
Me Talk Pretty One Day - Wikipedia
Me Talk Pretty One Day, published in 2000, is a collection of essays by American humorist David Sedaris. The book is separated into two parts.
Naked (book) - Wikipedia
Naked, published in 1997, is a collection of essays by American humorist David Sedaris. The book details Sedaris’ life, from his unusual upbringing in the suburbs of Raleigh, North Carolina, to his booze-and-drug-ridden college years, to his Kerouacian wandering as a young adult.
Book Review: ‘Happy-Go-Lucky,’ by David Sedaris - The New ...
In the past five years, David Sedaris has published seven books — two essay collections; an anthology; two diaries, both more than 500 pages long; a visual compendium to the diaries; and an ebook...
DAVID SEDARIS HOMEPAGE | David Sedaris Books
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.