If it didn’t come from Balducci’s, if it wasn’t raised on polenta and wild baby acorns, it has to be dangerous.” But family members’ square-peggedness is more than a little pathetic, and the fact that they are fodder for his stories doesn’t sit easy with Sedaris. When we ask her to lie in the middle of the street, her only question was ‘Where?’ ” Some of the tales cover more recent incidents, such as his sister’s retrieval of a turkey from a garbage can when Sedaris beards her about it, she responds, “Listen to you.

To get back in, the older kids devised a plan wherein the youngest, affection-hungry Tiffany, would be hit by a car: “Her eagerness to please is absolute and naked. Or the story of the time his mother, after a fifth snow day in a row, chucked all the Sedaris kids out the door and locked it. He draws some of the material from his youth, like the portrait of the folks across the street who didn’t own a TV (“What must it be like to be so ignorant and alone?” he wonders) and went trick-or-treating on November first. Once again we are treated to the author’s gift for deadpan humor, especially when poking fun at his family and neighbors. 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.Known for his self-deprecating wit and the harmlessly eccentric antics of his family, Sedaris ( Me Talk Pretty One Day, 2000, etc.) can also pinch until it hurts in this collection of autobiographical vignettes. '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. With this more reflective collection, Sedaris moves into the realm of the full-fledged memoirist.

It is a world alive with obscure desires and hidden motives, where forgiveness is automatic and an argument can be the highest form of love. In this collection of 22 essays, Thurber Prize winner and Daedalus favorite author David Sedaris lifts the corner of the seemingly ordinary family life he grew up in-playing in the snow, going on vacation, attending a wedding, giving directions, getting his blood sugar tested-to reveal the absurdity teeming below its surface.

Dress my family in corduroy and denim