When You Are Engulfed in Flames

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).

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