Me Talk Pretty One Day
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4.1 • 58 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sedaris is Garrison Keillor's evil twin: like the Minnesota humorist, Sedaris (Naked) focuses on the icy patches that mar life's sidewalk, though the ice in his work is much more slippery and the falls much more spectacularly funny than in Keillor's. Many of the 27 short essays collected here (which appeared originally in the New Yorker, Esquire and elsewhere) deal with his father, Lou, to whom the book is dedicated. Lou is a micromanager who tries to get his uninterested children to form a jazz combo and, when that fails, insists on boosting David's career as a performance artist by heckling him from the audience. Sedaris suggests that his father's punishment for being overly involved in his kids' artistic lives is David's brother Paul, otherwise known as "The Rooster," a half-literate miscreant whose language is outrageously profane. Sedaris also writes here about the time he spent in France and the difficulty of learning another language. After several extended stays in a little Norman village and in Paris, Sedaris had progressed, he observes, "from speaking like an evil baby to speaking like a hillbilly. `Is thems the thoughts of cows?' I'd ask the butcher, pointing to the calves' brains displayed in the front window." But in English, Sedaris is nothing if not nimble: in one essay he goes from his cat's cremation to his mother's in a way that somehow manages to remain reverent to both of the departed. "Reliable sources" have told Sedaris that he has "tended to exhaust people," and true to form, he will exhaust readers of this new book, tooDwith helpless laughter. 16-city author tour.
Customer Reviews
Funny
Hilarious, like a bunch of stories put together. I really enjoyed this book.
Gay Amusement
More self-defecating gay humour - amusing but predicable and shallow.
L.O.L!!!!!
I can't stop laughing. Brilliant! Can't wait to pick up another book by David Sedaris!