Selected Product:
| When You Are Engulfed in Flames
Hardcover
Author: David Sedaris
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Release Date: 2008-06-03
ISBN-10: 0316143472
ISBN-13: 9780316143479
List Price: $25.99
Average Customer Rating:
  | |
I Was Told There'd Be Cake
ISBN-10: 159448306X
ISBN-13: 9781594483066
List Price:$14.00
Snuff
ISBN-10: 0385517882
ISBN-13: 9780385517881
List Price:$24.95
A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father
ISBN-10: 0312342020
ISBN-13: 9780312342029
List Price:$24.95
Bright Shiny Morning
ISBN-10: 0061573132
ISBN-13: 9780061573132
List Price:$26.95
Leave the Building Quickly: True Stories (P.S.)
ISBN-10: 0060548525
ISBN-13: 9780060548520
List Price:$13.95
|
To use our price comparison to get the cheapest price, please click on the "Find the Cheapest Price" button located above for When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris (ISBN-10: 0316143472, ISBN-13: 9780316143479).
At this time we have not yet written a review for When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris (ISBN-10: 0316143472, ISBN-13: 9780316143479). Please continue to keep checking back to this page as we are constantly adding reviews.
Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
"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).
Praise for When You Are Engulfed in Flames:
"Older, wiser, smarter and meaner, Sedaris...defies the odds once again by delivering an intelligent take on the banalities of an absurd life." --Kirkus Reviews
This latest collection proves that not only does Sedaris still have it, but he's also getting better....Sedaris's best stuff will still--after all this time--move, surprise, and entertain." --Booklist
Table of Contents:
It's Catching
Keeping Up
The Understudy
This Old House
Buddy, Can You Spare a Tie?
Road Trips
What I Learned
That's Amore
The Monster Mash
In the Waiting Room
Solutions to Saturday's Puzzle
Adult Figures Charging Toward a Concrete Toadstool
Memento Mori
All the Beauty You Will Ever Need
Town and Country
Aerial
The Man in the Hut
Of Mice and Men
April in Paris
Crybaby
Old Faithful
The Smoking Section
LOL
| Customer Rating: | | I laughed. Out loud. On an airplane reading this book. BTW... Also check out the interview he did with Jon Stewart about it. Hysterical. |
Naked barrels engulfed in pretty denim
| Customer Rating: | "When You Are Engulfed in Flames" is David Sedaris' fifth full-length collection of humorous essays. I've long been a fan of his writing, which for the uninitiated tends to focus on the more skewed aspects of his family and life. His collections usually include a variety of stories from various epochs of his life - as a child and teenager with his hilarious family, in his twenties (when he did drugs and had a variety of bizarre jobs), and with his boyfriend, Hugh, in Europe.
Most of my favorite stories involve his family, especially stories from his youth. He adds one such gem here - "The Understudy," which features one of the worst babysitters in history, the corpulent and itchy, Mrs. Peacock. This story has more laugh-out-loud moments than anything I've read since....well since Sedaris' last book. I tend to enjoy less his essays about his years when he was an active drug user, although "All the Beauty You Will Ever Need" is one of the better of this genre.
Alas, this collection is a bit thin on stories about his family; perhaps as he gets older he will focus more on recent events filtered through his observational humor style; "Crybaby" is a good example from this collection. The longest section of the book details his attempt to stop smoking in Tokyo, which is not the strongest ending to this otherwise solid collection. Overall, "When You Are Engulfed in Flames" is average work for Sedaris; not as good "Naked" but still likely to keep his fans entertained and better than most humor essayists.
|
seemed somewhat different...but not worse than others.
| Customer Rating: | | This was a nice read--but, a little different from other David Sedaris books...not in a bad way. This book is about David's adult life... |
Fabulous!
| Customer Rating: | | I really was surprised by how much I enjoyed this. A few times, I laughed aloud- quite unusual for me if I am alone reading. Honestly, I was sorry when I finished the book- |
Huh?
| Customer Rating: | | After seeing some of the reviews on Amazon, I'm wondering if I even read the same book as everyone else. Everyone touts David Sedaris as this great comedic writer, and raves that his stream-of-consciousness short stories are hilarious or poignant by turns. There was the odd humorous moment here and there, but I can't say I found this book "laugh-out-loud funny" at all. Mostly I found it to be a lot of pointless rambling in a person's mind...which is probably fairly realistic, but not particularly interesting to me. Maybe I'm just not cut out for the short story style of writing. |
|
