When You Are Engulfed In Flames

Paperback / ISBN-13: 9780349116471

Price: £10.99

ON SALE: 7th May 2009

Genre: Biography & True Stories / Biography: General

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David Sedaris’s remarkable ability to uncover the hilarious absurdity teeming just below the surface of everyday life is elevated to wilder and more entertaining heights than ever in this new book of stories.

Sedaris proceeds from bizarre conundrums of daily life – the etiquette of having a lozenge fall from your mouth into the lap of a fellow passenger or how to soundproof your windows with LP covers against neurotic songbirds – to the most deeply resonant human truths. Taking in the parasitic worm that once lived in his mother-in-law’s leg, an encounter with a dingo and the purchase of a human skeleton, and culminating in a brilliant account of his attempt to quit smoking – in Tokyo – David Sedaris’s sixth story collection is a fresh masterpiece of comic writing.

Reviews

'Sedari s' anecdotes play off his sublime talent for turning the absurdly neurotic into the hilariously funny.
GQ
A virtual Klondike of darkly glittering anecdotes.
Adam Mars-Jones, Observer
The most popular American humorist since Woody Allen... As a prose stylist he is often compared to that other great New Yorker writer James Thurber - dry, mordant, pitch perfect. As a human being, the most obvious comparison is with the comedian Larry Davi
Ngel Farndale, Sunday Telegraph
Howlingly funny, jaw-snappingly honest and endlessly perceptive... Sedari s' wellspring of quirky yet strangely universal comic experiences show no sign of drying up.
Tom Cox, Daily Mail