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When You Are Engulfed in Flames | 
 enlarge | Author: David Sedaris
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Category: Book
List Price: $25.99
Buy New: $12.98
You Save: $13.01 (50%)
New (75) Used (30) Collectible (16) from $11.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  239 reviews
Sales Rank: 104
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.7 x 1.2
ISBN: 0316143472
Dewey Decimal Number: 814.54
EAN: 9780316143479
ASIN: 0316143472
Publication Date: June 3, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product 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).
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
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| Customer Reviews: Read 234 more reviews...
 LOL October 11, 2008
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 October 11, 2008
"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. October 4, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
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! October 2, 2008
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? October 2, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
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