One of the Great, Subtle Humorists of Our Time

When You Are Engulfed in Flames - David Sedaris
Originally published in hardcover in 2008 - Little, Brown

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When I first saw this in a bookstore I thought to myself, can he do it again? Is there more scrapable hilarity clinging to the walls of his interesting life, fit to amuse and entertain his many fans? Sedaris does in fact do it again and apparently there's an endless well of funny stuffy, a font of hilarity, within this man.


This is another great collection, on par with his other works for all the Sedaris fans out there. There is one story in particular (“That's Amore”) -- or rather a character in this story -- I would love to see him write a full length piece on. Helen is too good (or bad) to be true. As with city rats, Sedaris likens her to the “type of creature [he] expected to find living in New York.” 


When apartment shopping in New York it was Hugh (Sedaris’ partner) who runs into the 70-something year old first, “[nodding] hello and as he turned to leave, she pointed to some bags lying at her feet.
“'Carry my groceries upstairs.' She sounded like a man, or, rather, a hit man, her voice coarse and low, like heavy footsteps on gravel.
“'Now?' Hugh asked.
“She said, 'What? You got something better to do?'”


As with his other collections Sedaris has a very matter of fact method for transferring his hilarious life musings to the page. And I love of his use of the word “faggoty.” Two thumbs up for anyone looking for something light and a must-read for Sedaris fans.

Seattle Times description - "David Sedaris's ability to transform the mortification of everyday life into wildly entertaining art," (The Christian Science Monitor) is elevated to wilder and more entertaining heights than ever in this remarkable new book. 

Trying to make coffee when the water is shut off, David considers using the water in a vase of flowers and his chain of associations takes him from the French countryside to a hilariously uncomfortable memory of buying drugs in a mobile home in rural North Carolina. In essay after essay, Sedaris proceeds from bizarre conundrums of daily life-having a lozenge fall from your mouth into the lap of a fellow passenger on a plane or armoring the windows with LP covers to protect the house from neurotic songbirds-to the most deeply resonant human truths. Culminating in a brilliant account of his venture to Tokyo in order to quit smoking, David Sedaris's sixth essay collection is a new masterpiece of comic writing from "a writer worth treasuring" (Seattle Times).