Dress Your Family in Corduroy & Denim

It all sounds so normal, doesn't it?

In his newest collection of essays, David Sedaris lifts the corner of ordinary life, revealing the absurdity teeming below its surface. His world is alive with obscure desires and hidden motives — a world where forgiveness is automatic and an argument can be the highest form of love.

In Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, Sedaris returns to his deliriously twisted domain: hilarious childhood dramas infused with melancholy; the gulf of misunderstanding that exists between people of different nations or members of the same family; and the poignant divide between one's best hopes and most common deeds. The family characters his readers love are all here, as well as the unique terrain they inhabit, strewn with comic landmines.

• "The Rooster" is back, and getting married in the funniest wedding ever described.
• David attends a slumber party and gets the upper hand in a unique version of strip poker.
• "Rubber or plastic?" The strangest questions can tear people apart.
• A skinny guy from Spain, wearing a bishop's hat and accompanied by six to eight men, invades your house and pretends to kick you. Is this any way to spend Christmas?

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim is another unforgettable collection from one of the wittiest and most original writers at work today.

"[A] brilliant comic performance — a deftly shaken cocktail of wit, weirdness, and melancholy....Sedaris deserves a rave for giving us another book, period. But he's getting one here for giving us the best book of his career. (Grade: A)" Augusten Burroughs, Entertainment Weekly

"Like his earlier performances, the essays are sardonic, funny and wry, but at the same time there is a new strain of introspection that makes for a book with more emotional resonance, a more complex aftertaste." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Sedaris's sense of life's absurdity is on full, fine display, as is his emotional body armor. Fortunately, he has plenty of both." Kirkus Reviews

"Sedaris' piquant essays are as meticulously honed and precisely timed as the best stand-up comic routines....[H]e is mesmerizing, and his ability to make the reader gasp, laugh out loud, or grow teary is undiminished." Donna Seaman, Booklist

"Sedaris is the J.K. Rowling of American humor writers....This summer release is not recommended for beach reading. Laughing so hard will cause everything to jiggle." Colleen Kruse, Minneapolis Star Tribune

"As happiness and success are more in evidence, they find themselves balanced against a strange, new attitude of self-reckoning." Stephen Metcalf, The New York Times Book Review

Me Talk Pretty One Day was an international bestselling sensation, selling over one million copies combined to date and spending 73 weeks on the New York Times bestseller lists. This is Sedaris's first major collection in four years.

Sedaris returns to his deliriously twisted domain: hilarious childhood dramas infused with melancholy; the gulf of misunderstanding that exists between people of different nations or members of the same family; and the poignant divide between one's best hopes and most common deeds.

David Sedaris is a playwright and a regular commentator for National Public Radio. He is also the author of the bestselling Barrel Fever, Naked, Holidays on Ice, and Me Talk Pretty One Day. He travels extensively though Europe and the United States on lecture tours and lives in France.