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.

"In his latest collection, Sedaris has found his heart. This is not to suggest that the author of Me Talk Pretty One Day and other bestselling books has lost his edge. The 27 essays here (many previously published in Esquire, G.Q., or the New Yorker, or broadcast on NPR's This American Life) include his best and funniest writing yet. Here is Sedaris's family in all its odd glory. Here is his father dragging his mortified son over to the home of one of the most popular boys in school, a boy possessed of 'an uncanny ability to please people,' demanding that the boy's parents pay for the root canal that Sedaris underwent after the boy hit him in the mouth with a rock. Here is his oldest sister, Lisa, imploring him to keep her beloved Amazon parrot out of a proposed movie based on his writing. ('"Will I have to be fat in the movie?" she asked.') Here is his mother, his muse, locking the kids out of the house after one snow day too many, playing the wry, brilliant commentator on his life until her untimely death from cancer. His mother emerges as one of the most poignant and original female characters in contemporary literature. She balances bitter and sweet, tart and rich — and so does Sedaris, because this is what life is like. 'You should look at yourself,' his mother says in one piece, as young Sedaris crams Halloween candy into his mouth rather than share it. He does what she says and then some, and what emerges is the deepest kind of humor, the human comedy." Publishers Weekly (Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"[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

"Do yourself a favor and rush out to read the damn book for yourself. It's already shaping up to be a summer starved for good laughs and...you'll find few better than the ones on offer in Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim." Chris Lehmann, The Washington Post Book World

"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.