David Sedaris has narrated 19 audiobooks on Listento.it by 7 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.6★ across 1,294 ratings. The most-rated is Calypso.
Calypso
Summary
David Sedaris returns with his most deeply personal and darkly hilarious book. If you've ever laughed your way through David Sedaris's cheerfully misanthropic stories, you might think you know what you're getting with Calypso. You'd be wrong. When he buys a beach house on the Carolina coast, Sedaris envisions long, relaxing vacations spent playing board games and lounging in the sun with those he loves most. And life at the Sea Section, as he names the vacation home, is exactly as idyllic as he imagined, except for one tiny, vexing realization: it's impossible to take a vacation from yourself. With Calypso, Sedaris sets his formidable powers of observation toward middle age and mortality. Make no mistake: these stories are very, very funny - it's a book that can make you laugh 'til you snort, the way only family can. Sedaris's powers of observation have never been sharper, and his ability to shock readers into laughter unparalleled. But much of the comedy here is born out of that vertiginous moment when your own body betrays you and you realize that the story of your life is made up of more past than future. This is beach reading for people who detest beaches, required reading for those who loathe small talk and love a good tumor joke. Calypso is simultaneously Sedaris's darkest and warmest book yet - and it just might be his very best.
©2018 David Sedaris (P)2018 Hachette Audio
Lincoln in the Bardo
Summary
Winner of the 2018 Audie Award for Audiobook of the Year The long-awaited first novel from the author of Tenth of December: a moving and original father-son story featuring none other than Abraham Lincoln, as well as an unforgettable cast of supporting characters, living and dead, historical and invented February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln’s beloved 11-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,” the president says at the time. “God has called him home.” Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns, alone, to the crypt several times to hold his boy’s body. From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state—called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo—a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie’s soul. Lincoln in the Bardo is an astonishing feat of imagination and a bold step forward from one of the most important and influential writers of his generation. Formally daring, generous in spirit, deeply concerned with matters of the heart, it is a testament to fiction’s ability to speak honestly and powerfully to the things that really matter to us. Saunders has invented a thrilling new form that deploys a kaleidoscopic, theatrical panorama of voices to ask a timeless, profound question: How do we live and love when we know that everything we love must end? The 166-person full cast features award-winning actors and musicians, as well as a number of Saunders’ family, friends, and members of his publishing team, including, in order of their appearance: Nick Offerman as Hans Vollman David Sedaris as Roger Bevins III Carrie Brownstein as Isabelle Perkins George Saunders as The Reverend Everly Thomas Miranda July as Mrs. Elizabeth Crawford Lena Dunham as Elise Traynor Ben Stiller as Jack Manders Julianne Moore as Jane Ellis Susan Sarandon as Mrs. Abigail Blass Bradley Whitford as Lt. Cecil Stone Bill Hader as Eddie Baron Megan Mullally as Betsy Baron Rainn Wilson as Percival “Dash” Collier Jeff Tweedy as Captain William Prince Kat Dennings as Miss Tamara Doolittle Jeffrey Tambor as Professor Edmund Bloomer Mike O’Brien as Lawrence T. Decroix Keegan-Michael Key as Elson Farwell Don Cheadle as Thomas Havens Patrick Wilson as Stanley “Perfesser” Lippert With Kirby Heyborne as Willie Lincoln, Mary Karr as Mrs. Rose Milland, and Cassandra Campbell as Your Narrator Praise for the audiobook “Lincoln in the Bardo sets a new standard for cast recordings in its structure, in its performances, and in its boldness. Now, let's see who answers the challenge.” (Chicago Tribune) “Like the novel, the audiobook breaks new ground in what can be accomplished through a story. It helps that there’s not a single bad note in the cast of a whopping 166 people. It’s also the rare phenomenon of an audiobook being a completely different experience compared to the novel. Even if you’ve read the novel, the audiobook is worth a listen (and vice versa). The whole project pushes the narrative form forward.” (A.V. Club) “The result is an auditory experience unlike any other, where the awareness of individual voices disappears while the carefully calibrated soundscape summons a metaphysical masterpiece. This is a tour de force of audiobook production, and a dazzling realization of Saunders’ unique authorial structure.” (Booklist) “The finished audiobook’s tapestry of voices perfectly mirrors the novel.” (Entertainment Weekly)
©2017 George Saunders (P)2017 Random House Audio
Me Talk Pretty One Day
Summary
David Sedaris' new collection of essays - including live recordings! - tells a most unconventional life story. It begins with a North Carolina childhood filled with speech-therapy classes ("There was the lisp, of course, but more troubling than that was my voice itself, with its excitable tone and high, girlish pitch") and unwanted guitar lessons taught by a midget. From budding performance artist ("The only crimp in my plan was that I seemed to have no talent whatsoever") to "clearly unqualified" writing teacher in Chicago, Sedaris' career leads him to New York City and eventually, of all places, France. His move to Paris poses a number of challenges, chief among them his inability to speak the language. Arriving a "spooky man-child" capable of communicating only through nouns, he undertakes language instruction that leads him ever deeper into cultural confusion. Whether describing the Easter bunny to puzzled classmates or watching a group of men play soccer with a cow, Sedaris brings a view and a voice like no other to every unforgettable encounter.
©2000 by David Sedaris, All Rights Reserved (P)2000 by Time Warner AudioBooks, A Division of Time Warner Trade Publishing
Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls
Summary
Audie Award Finalist, Humor, 2014 From the unique perspective of David Sedaris comes a new collection of essays taking his listeners on a bizarre and stimulating world tour. From the perils of French dentistry to the eating habits of the Australian kookaburra, from the squat-style toilets of Beijing to the particular wilderness of a North Carolina Costco, we learn about the absurdity and delight of a curious traveler's experiences. Whether railing against the habits of litterers in the English countryside or marveling over a disembodied human arm in a taxidermist's shop, Sedaris takes us on side-splitting adventures that are not to be forgotten.
©2013 David Sedaris (P)2013 Hachette Audio
When You Are Engulfed in Flames
Summary
Once again, David Sedaris brings together a collection of essays so uproariously funny and profoundly moving that his legions of fans will fall for him all over again. He tests the limits of love when Hugh lances a boil from his backside, and pushes the boundaries of laziness when, finding the water shut off in his house in Normandy, he looks to the water in a vase of fresh cut flowers to fill the coffee machine. From armoring the windows with LP covers to protect the house from neurotic songbirds, to the awkwardness of having a lozenge fall from your mouth into the lap of a sleeping fellow passenger on a plane, David Sedaris uses life's most bizarre moments to reach new heights in understanding love and fear, family and strangers. Culminating in a brilliantly funny account of his venture to Tokyo in order to quit smoking, David Sedaris' sixth essay collection has been avidly anticipated.
©2008 David Sedaris (P)2008 Hachette Audio
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
Summary
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. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim is another unforgettable collection from one of the wittiest and most original writers at work today.
©2004 David Sedaris (P)2004 Time Warner AudioBooks
Theft by Finding
Summary
One of the most anticipated books of 2017: New York Times Book Review, New York's Vulture, Bustle, and BookRiot. From best-selling author David Sedaris, for the first time in print: selections from the diaries that are the source of his remarkable autobiographical essays. For nearly four decades, David Sedaris has faithfully kept a diary in which he records his thoughts and observations on the odd and funny events he witnesses. Anyone who has attended a live Sedaris event knows that his diary readings are often among the most joyful parts of the evening. But never before have they been available in print. Now, in Theft by Finding, Sedaris brings us his favorite entries. From deeply poignant to laugh-out-loud funny, these selections reveal with new intimacy a man longtime fans only think they know. Tender, hilarious, illuminating, and endlessly captivating, Theft by Finding offers a rare look into the mind of one of our generation's greatest comic geniuses.
©2017 David Sedaris (P)2017 Hachette Audio
The Best of Me
Summary
David Sedaris’s best stories and essays, spanning his remarkable career - as selected by the author himself For more than 25 years, David Sedaris has been carving out a unique literary space, virtually creating his own genre. A Sedaris story may seem confessional, but is also highly attuned to the world outside. It opens our eyes to what is at absurd and moving about our daily existence. And it is almost impossible to hear without laughing. Now, for the first time collected in one volume, the author brings us his funniest and most memorable work. In these stories, Sedaris shops for rare taxidermy, hitchhikes with a lady quadriplegic, and spits a lozenge into a fellow traveler’s lap. He drowns a mouse in a bucket, struggles to say “give it to me” in five languages, and hand-feeds a carnivorous bird. But if all you expect to find in Sedaris’s work is the deft and sharply observed comedy for which he became renowned, you may be surprised to discover that his words bring more warmth than mockery, more fellow-feeling than derision. Nowhere is this clearer than in his writing about his loved ones. In this audiobook, Sedaris explores falling in love and staying together, recognizing his own aging not in the mirror but in the faces of his siblings, losing one parent and coming to terms - at long last - with the other. Taken together, the stories in The Best of Me reveal the wonder and delight Sedaris takes in the surprises life brings him. No experience, he sees, is quite as he expected - it’s often harder, more fraught, and certainly weirder - but sometimes it is also much richer and more wonderful. Full of joy, generosity, and the incisive humor that has led David Sedaris to be called “the funniest man alive” (Time Out New York), The Best of Me spans a career spent watching and learning and laughing - quite often at himself - and invites listeners deep into the world of one of the most brilliant and original writers of our time.
©2020 David Sedaris (P)2020 Little, Brown & Company
Naked
Summary
Welcome to the hilarious, strange, elegiac, outrageous world of David Sedaris. In Naked, Sedaris turns the current mania for the memoir on its proverbial ear, mining the exceedingly rich terrain of his life, his family, and his unique worldview, a sensibility at once take-no-prisoners sharp and deeply charitable. A tart-tongued mother does dead-on imitations of her young son's nervous tics, to the great amusement of his teachers; a stint of Kerouackian wandering is undertaken (of course!) with a quadriplegic companion. Through it all is Sedaris's unmistakable voice, without a doubt one of the freshest in American writing.
©1997 David Sedaris (P)1998, 2001 Time Warner AudioBooks
Holidays on Ice
Summary
David Sedaris's beloved holiday collection is new again with six more pieces, including a never before published story. Along with such favorites as the diaries of a Macy's elf and the annals of two very competitive families, are Sedaris's tales of tardy trick-or-treaters ("Us and Them"); the difficulties of explaining the Easter Bunny to the French ("Jesus Shaves"); what to do when you've been locked out in a snowstorm ("Let It Snow"); the puzzling Christmas traditions of other nations ("Six to Eight Black Men"); what Halloween at the medical examiner's looks like ("The Monster Mash"); and a barnyard secret Santa scheme gone awry ("Cow and Turkey"). No matter what your favorite holiday, you won't want to miss celebrating it with the author who has been called "one of the funniest writers alive" (Economist).
©2008 David Sedaris (P)2008 David Sedaris
1Q84 - Livre 1, Avril-Juin
Summary
Le passé - tel qu'il était peut-être - fait surgir sur le miroir l'ombre d'un présent - différent de ce qu'il fut ? Un événement éditorial sans précédent. Une œuvre hypnotique et troublante. Un roman d'aventures. Une histoire d'amour. Deux êtres unis par un pacte secret. Dans le monde bien réel de 1984 et dans celui dangereusement séduisant de 1Q84 va se nouer le destin de Tengo et d'Aomamé...
©2011 . Traduit du japonais par Hélène Morita, avec la collaboration de Yôko Miyamoto et (P)201 1
Themes and Variations
Summary
An Amazon Charts Bestseller. In this surprising essay, international bestselling humor writer David Sedaris shares the rewards of a book tour and his devoted readers’ worst-kept secrets. Dismissed by a bored author at a book signing, a betrayed young man named David Sedaris made a vow. Someday, when it was his turn at the table, he’d connect with his readers. The experience has been even more revealing than he’d hoped. In this hilarious and perceptive essay, the celebrated humorist reflects on the unusual patterns of forced socialization between author and audience, and the obligations and sometimes surprising returns of not-so-chance encounters with strangers: jokes, secrets, insights, and even charity.
©2020 David Sedaris (P)2020 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
The Invincible
Summary
Invincible is a classic science fiction thriller by the author of Solaris - for the first time translated directly from the original. A starship from Earth is challenged by a mysterious hostile intelligence.
©2017 Tomasz Lem (P)2018 Tantor
David Sedaris Live at Carnegie Hall
Summary
If you are driving, pull over. If you are at work, close your door, unless you don't mind your colleagues seeing you doubled over, in tears, on your office floor. With this recording, taped before a delirious sold out audience at Carnegie Hall, you are there as David Sedaris performs new stories from his upcoming book. A parrot who mimics an ice maker, lovers quarreling over a rubber hand, and a Santa Claus who moonlights from his job as bishop of Turkey, the cast of characters in these stories is like no other. This new work will appeal to David's loyal fans as well as admirers of the classic comedy albums of George Carlin, Bill Cosby, and Steve Martin. Recorded live on October 22, 2002, in New York City.
©2003 David Sedaris (P)2003 Time Warner AudioBooks
Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk
Summary
Featuring David Sedaris's unique blend of hilarity and heart, this new collection of keen-eyed animal-themed tales is an utter delight. Though the characters may not be human, the situations in these stories bear an uncanny resemblance to the insanity of everyday life. In "The Toad, the Turtle, and the Duck", three strangers commiserate about animal bureaucracy while waiting in a complaint line. In "Hello Kitty", a cynical feline struggles to sit through his prison-mandated AA meetings. In "The Squirrel and the Chipmunk", a pair of star-crossed lovers is separated by prejudiced family members. Once again David Sedaris shows us the most outrageous, tender, absurd sides of ourselves in his "profoundly funny, well-crafted stories that somehow, magically, bring home a major point about fidelity or guilt or love...." (Christian Science Monitor).
©2010 David Sedaris (P)2010 Hachette Audio
Barrel Fever and Other Stories
Summary
In David Sedaris' world, no one is safe and no cow is sacred. A manic cross between Mark Leyner, Fran Lebowitz, and the National Enquirer, Sedaris' collection of essays is a rollicking tour through the national Zeitgeist: a do-it-yourself suburban dad saves money by performing home surgery; a man who is loved too much flees the heavyweight champion of the world; a teenage suicide tries to incite a lynch mob at her funeral; a bitter Santa abuses the elves. David Sedaris made his debut on NPR's Morning Edition with "SantaLand Diaries", recounting his strange-but-true experiences as an elf at Macy's, and soon became one of the show's most popular commentators. With a perfect eye and a voice infused with as much empathy as wit, Sedaris writes stories and essays that target the soulful ridiculousness of our behavior. Barrel Fever is like a blind date with modern life, and anything can happen.
©1994, 1996, 1997, 1998 David Sedaris (P)1998, 2001 Time Warner AudioBooks
Godchosen
Summary
"You will be the father of kings...." A prophecy to a 16-year-old blacksmith’s son sends Trygare kan Ingan from his home in the Cymenean glyns, armed only with his father’s sword. Being Godchosen isn’t easy. The woman he wants doesn’t want him, the man who should be his best friend thinks him laughable, and everyone ridicules his youth, to say nothing of his glyndweller accent. Slaying a dragon and defending the country from invaders changes their minds, and things are going nicely, but then the gods interfere... Tragedy strikes, sending Trygare to a foreign land where his true destiny lies...to become the ancestor of a dynasty that will rule his planet for three thousand years. Combine Conan the Barbarian with Skyrim, add a dash of Game of Thrones, and the result will be this epic chronicle of the kan Ingan empire. Grab your copy today!
©2020 Aethon Books (P)2021 Aethon Audio
Maximillian Fly
Summary
The best-selling author of the Septimus Heap series, Angie Sage, delivers a gripping and darkly humorous tale of Maximillian Fly - a human with cockroach features - whose quiet life is upended when he aids two human children in their escape from an oppressive governing power. Perfect for fans of Lemony Snicket and Adam Gidwitz. Maximillian Fly wants no trouble. Yet because he stands at six feet two, with beautiful indigo wings, long antennae, and more arms than you or me, many are frightened of him. He is a gentle creature who looks like a giant cockroach. This extraordinary human wants to prove his goodness, so he opens his door to two SilverSeed children in search of a place to hide. Instantly, Maximillian’s quiet, solitary life changes. There are dangerous powers after them and they have eyes everywhere. But in this gray city of Hope trapped under the Orb, is escape even possible? Maximillian Fly is a masterful story brimming with suspense, plot twists, and phenomenal world building. This compelling novel delves into family dynamics and themes of prejudice, making the case for tolerance, empathy, and understanding. Junior Library Guild Selection • Kids' Indie Next List • New York Public Library Best Books of 2019 Selection 2020 LITA Excellence in Children's and Young Adult Science Fiction Notable Book: The Eleanor Cameron Notable Middle Grade Books List
©2019 Angie Sage (P)2019 HarperAudio
Bewilderness, Part Three: Destroyer of Worlds
Summary
The Gateway Project was going to save our world by opening up a doorway to infinite versions of our planet. But the threshold has gone completely out of control, sending all those other Earths onto a collision course with ours. Now, our reality is cracking apart. Abby Corman did not open the Gateway, but she is the only one who knows how to close it. But an alien Hunter and her pack of deadly hellcats have stepped into our world, and they will stop at nothing to kill Abby. Because in a universe of parallel worlds, one Earth’s savior can be the worst criminal other Earths have ever known. Bewilderness: What Rough Beast continues the gripping tale of science fiction horror as two women - one human, one alien - battle each other to save infinity.
©2021 Jonathan Maberry Productions, LLC (P)2021 Audible Originals, LLC.