Audio Review
It just isn’t fair: most of us would be lucky to be able to express ourselves in writing half as well as David Sedaris does in his new book, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. But on top of his skills with the written word, the author also has substantial gifts as a performer, and he proves this on the audio version of the book. In his essay The Change in Me,Sedaris remembers that his mother was good at imitating people, and it’s clear that he takes after her. Whether he’s doing impressions of high-voiced brother Paul, or recalling times when he and his sisters tried to win good karma by speaking and acting like well-behaved, fairytale children, Sedaris’s nuanced performance hits the right note on both the opening, comedic stories, and the more poignant essays that tend to come later in the reading. In fact, for those who have already read some of the best stories in other publications including The New Yorker, the CD or cassette version of this collection is probably the best bet for furthering your appreciation of the material.

Sedaris’s career is closely linked with two things: audio (he was discovered by NPR’s Ira Glass), and the personal lives of himself and his family. In Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, he describes fights with his boyfriend, and his sister-in-law’s difficult pregnancy. When sister Lisa complains about the stories involving the family, he writes about that, too. Sedaris's latest provides more evidence that he is a great humorist, memoirist and raconteur, and readers are lucky to have the opportunity to know him so well. Perhaps they are luckier still not to know him personally. --Leah Weathersby

From Publishers Weekly
Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day, etc.) perfects his written essays by going on the road and reading them aloud, so it's no surprise that his new collection is even more hilarious and haunting as an audiobook. All 22 of the book's essays are here, and it's a treasury of riches matched by Sedaris's slightly nasal but enthralling delivery. Sedaris's material has always walked a razor's edge between hilarious and heartbreaking, and never more so than here. Although Sedaris pokes fun at his family, he mixes the laughs with empathy. When he tries to make sense out of his sister's squalid living conditions in "Put a Lid on It," his deadpan descriptions and hyper reactions are hysterically funny, but it's clear that his sister is a complex person, not just a punch line. Likewise, his late mother, previously seen as a chain-smoking, tart-talking dame, gains more depth in the downright spooky "The Girl Next Store." In "The End of the Affair," he and boyfriend Hugh disagree over a romantic movie and he concludes, "Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you're offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone's feelings." Still, Sedaris hasn't lost his irreverence; in "Possession," he tours Anne Frank's annex and imagines how he'd redecorate it. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School - This lighthearted follow-up to Me Talk Pretty One Day(Little, Brown, 2000) contains a selection of personal essays. Some of the pieces appeared previously in magazines or on the NPR radio program This American Life. The first half of the collection focuses on Sedaris's childhood, including his relationship with his supportive mother and "man's man" of a father. Family vacations, snow days from school, and parental conflicts are all rendered in a comic style. Several of the pieces highlight the author's growing up with the knowledge that he is gay. He writes about the mixture of feelings he experienced in a real but funny manner. The second half moves Sedaris into adulthood. Although still dealing chiefly with his family, the focus shifts to his brother and sisters. From Tiffany, who collects and sells junk right from her house, to macho, floor-sanding Paul, Sedaris sets up a family dynamic that's sometimes odd, sometimes sad, but always funny. A handful of pieces include or refer to his life partner, Hugh. Whether it's apartment searching in "Possession" or the clash of personalities in "A Can of Worms," it's refreshing to see a writer portray a gay relationship that's committed and monogamous. Although not as unified as his other books, this collection serves as a touching reminder of how odd, funny, and unique our lives really are. - Matthew L. Moffett, Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Critics agree that Corduroy and Denim marks Sedaris’s transition from a humorist and essayist into a full-fledged memoirist. The volume returns to the dysfunctional childhood and adulthood tribulations that made Naked and Me Talk Pretty One Day bestsellers, and contains the same snarky wit, heartbreaking humor, and touch of malice. But this time, melancholy, introspection, and even a bit of sadness create more emotionally wrought stories. Perhaps Sedaris is, as Newsday suggests, finally recognizing the distance he often puts between himself and his subjects. The only complaint? A few pieces add humor in inappropriate places (does Sedaris really covet the Anne Frank house?). A must read for Sedaris fans; for novices, the best introduction to one of the nation’s funniest writers. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From AudioFile
David Sedaris's latest collection of essays is his most intimate, made even more so by his keen delivery. They reflect a writing maturity: His insecurities and compulsions are more apparent than ever, which just makes the stories of awkward childhood, awkward adolescence, and awkward adulthood that much more eminently relatable. Which is not to say that you won't be laughing out loud at his impression of his redneck brother in "Rooster at the Hitchin' Post" or any of the other small absurdities of life that he captures so memorably. One of Sedaris's gifts is that he can be hilarious and heartrending (but never maudlin) in the same sentence. Three of the live performances, including "Six to Eight Black Men," will be familiar from last year's LIVE AT CARNEGIE HALL, but they're no less funny on second listening. Sedaris's essays are written to be heard, so listen up--he just keeps getting better. J.M.D. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
Sedaris' piquant essays are as meticulously honed and precisely timed as the best stand-up comic routines, which is, of course, what they are. A National Public Radio star, the author of five best-sellers, including Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000), and a hall-filling performer, Sedaris--openly gay, nervy as a tightrope walker, sharply hilarious, teasingly misanthropic yet genuinely compassionate--has a unique ability to supply exactly the right details to bring every funny, awkward, ludicrous, painful, horrible real-life moment into harrowingly crisp focus. But given all that he has already revealed about his childhood, family, and bizarre adventures, one wonders how he can continue to mine his life to create fresh and arresting essays, and, indeed, a few pieces do feel strained. It stretches one's credulity, for instance, to envision young Sedaris panhandling or taking erotic advantage of a strip poker game. But when he muses over his parents' "slumlord" phase, remembers a rich aunt and a neglected nine-year-old girl, and profiles his over-the-top brother, he is mesmerizing, and his ability to make the reader gasp, laugh out loud, or grow teary is undiminished. At the same time, there's an increased edginess to his work, reminding readers that beneath the brio, Sedaris, gifted connoisseur of the absurd, is deadly serious. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM THE PUBLISHER

David 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?

With this new book, Sedaris's prose reaches breathtaking new heights and marks off a territory that is unmistakably his own. Read it and weep tears of humane laughter.

FROM THE CRITICS

Chris Lehmann - The Washington Post

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, familiar though they may seem, you'll find few better than the ones on offer in Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim.

USA Today

Sedaris, humorist and author of the best-selling Me Talk Pretty One Day, once again exhibits his knack for spinning unsettling experiences into pure comic gold.—Allison Block

The New York Times

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. The embarrassments of adolescence, the difficulties of connecting, the sense of being a perpetual outsider—these perennial themes of the author are not simply played for self-deprecating laughs in this volume, but are made to yield a more Chekhovian brand of comedy.—Michiko Kakutani

Publishers Weekly

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. Author tour. (June) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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