When You are Engulfed in Flames
by David Sedaris
published by Hachette (Back Bay Books)
2008
David Sedaris is a storyteller, and whether that story is a real one about having a truck driver attempt to persaude him to exchange sexual acts, or an imagined one about majoring in Patricide at Princeton, he tells these stories in a dry, engaging, and periodically distressing way.
I laughed loudly enough that I may have alarmed the neighbors. (To soften this strong endorsement, I admit that I laughed less often than I did while reading Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls: some of this relates to being familiar with his work, and laughing quietly rather than loudly. You know what I mean.) The only repeat story was the Normandy creepy-old-man story, but all others were new to me.
I recommend this collection if you like his other story collections.