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Sedaris
“When you're laughing aloud at David Sedaris’s every sentence, it’s easy to miss the more serious side of what he’s up to. Fortunately, Kevin Kopelson has come along to guide readers through the work of the best and most subversive social satirist in America.” —Stephen McCauley, author of The Object of My Affection
"Charting a course from Marcel Proust to Tony Danza, Kevin artfully captures the exquisite pleasure and pain of reading David Sedaris. A witty, thoughtful, intimate encounter." —David Hyde Pierce
"If I were to read a book on David Sedaris it might be this one." —Paul Reubens
David Sedaris is nothing less than a literary phenomenon. His readings and live performances sell out within hours, while his books—Barrel Fever, Holidays on Ice, Naked, Me Talk Pretty One Day, and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim—have each been best-sellers. Sedaris became an almost overnight sensation in 1992 when he recounted his surreal experiences working as a Macy’s department store elf named Crumpet on NPR’s Morning Edition. The sardonic wit displayed in his “SantaLand Diaries” has since made him America’s preeminent satirist—brutally honest, often painfully sad, and above all, truly hilarious. In Sedaris, Kevin Kopelson engages with the most difficult, uncomfortable, and often most humorous aspects of Sedaris’s writing—shame and public humiliation, dysfunctional families and destructive relationships, misanthropy and self-loathing—to reveal what makes Sedaris such an effective and affecting satirist, and to show why so many readers and listeners identify with him. For Kopelson, the key to understanding Sedaris lies in recognizing the importance of relationships to his comedy. Drawing extensively on both his nonfiction essays and short stories, Kopelson maps out Sedaris’s relationships in more or less chronological order—grandparents, parents, siblings, teachers, friends, coworkers, strangers, children, and lovers—and identifies the misunderstandings, betrayals, and cruelties that we all experience, but which in Sedaris’s voice are brilliantly and grotesquely magnified. Written for everyone who loves David Sedaris and has wondered why they find him so relevant to their own lives, Sedaris succeeds in taking seriously this sublimely caustic, riotously funny, and ultimately important writer. And for anyone unfamiliar with Sedaris, this book is the perfect introduction. Kevin Kopelson is professor of English at the University of Iowa. His previous books include Neatness Essays on the Writer’s Desk (Minnesota, 2004).
"Charting a course from Marcel Proust to Tony Danza, Kevin artfully captures the exquisite pleasure and pain of reading David Sedaris. A witty, thoughtful, intimate encounter." —David Hyde Pierce
"If I were to read a book on David Sedaris it might be this one." —Paul Reubens
David Sedaris is nothing less than a literary phenomenon. His readings and live performances sell out within hours, while his books—Barrel Fever, Holidays on Ice, Naked, Me Talk Pretty One Day, and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim—have each been best-sellers. Sedaris became an almost overnight sensation in 1992 when he recounted his surreal experiences working as a Macy’s department store elf named Crumpet on NPR’s Morning Edition. The sardonic wit displayed in his “SantaLand Diaries” has since made him America’s preeminent satirist—brutally honest, often painfully sad, and above all, truly hilarious. In Sedaris, Kevin Kopelson engages with the most difficult, uncomfortable, and often most humorous aspects of Sedaris’s writing—shame and public humiliation, dysfunctional families and destructive relationships, misanthropy and self-loathing—to reveal what makes Sedaris such an effective and affecting satirist, and to show why so many readers and listeners identify with him. For Kopelson, the key to understanding Sedaris lies in recognizing the importance of relationships to his comedy. Drawing extensively on both his nonfiction essays and short stories, Kopelson maps out Sedaris’s relationships in more or less chronological order—grandparents, parents, siblings, teachers, friends, coworkers, strangers, children, and lovers—and identifies the misunderstandings, betrayals, and cruelties that we all experience, but which in Sedaris’s voice are brilliantly and grotesquely magnified. Written for everyone who loves David Sedaris and has wondered why they find him so relevant to their own lives, Sedaris succeeds in taking seriously this sublimely caustic, riotously funny, and ultimately important writer. And for anyone unfamiliar with Sedaris, this book is the perfect introduction. Kevin Kopelson is professor of English at the University of Iowa. His previous books include Neatness Essays on the Writer’s Desk (Minnesota, 2004).
- GenresNonfiction
272 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
74 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
November 13, 2007
This isn't as much an analysis of David Sedaris's works as it is a Proust scholar trying to justify his existence. Points off also for the clumsy mention of his other four books in the prologue. In between all the comparisons to (and heinously long excerpts from)Proust are some interesting ideas, but in my head I keep hearing "Did I mention I'm the foremost Proust scholar in America? from the film Little Miss Sunshine - but without Steve Carell's great delivery. I wonder what the real Sedaris thinks of this.
Update: I had the opportunity to ask David Sedaris what he thought of it on 10/16/07. He said he hadn't read it, but that the author was good looking and that he (Koppelson) had designed the cover hoping people would think David Sedaris had written a book entitled "Kevin Koppelson".
Update: I had the opportunity to ask David Sedaris what he thought of it on 10/16/07. He said he hadn't read it, but that the author was good looking and that he (Koppelson) had designed the cover hoping people would think David Sedaris had written a book entitled "Kevin Koppelson".
November 11, 2008
I'm happy to see Sedaris being taken so seriously by an academic, but the parts I liked the best were quotes from Sedaris.
March 2, 2008
I'm disappointed in this book, but admit that is wasn't a waste of my time. An English prof from Iowa examines what we learn about Sedaris from his depictions of various people in his writings. His comparisons of Sedaris to Proust quickly became tedious.
March 18, 2009
I'm sorry, but I thought this was a huge disappointment. Honestly, I couldn't even finish it - I gave up about 2/3 of the way through. I was expecting some deeper analysis of Sedaris's snarky and delicious oeuvre, but the book just seemed to gloss over themes readily apparent to anyone breathing and a carbon life form. In addition, the author tended to use Sedaris's stories to make facile arguments about how terrible and psychologically devious his entire family is. I don't think this is the point of Sedaris stories in the slightest, and ignores his "they're all pretty much nuts, but so am I, and I do love them anyway" kind of attitude towards his family - but maybe I'm just too dense and pedestrian to see the big, fancy academic point the author is trying to make. Finally, there seemed to be an over-reliance in the text of large verbatim portions or bald, oxygen-stripped retellings of Sedaris stories themselves. You certainly expect quotes in lit crit, but this was just overkill. This book just made me want to reread Sedaris, and drop this book in the garbage. Even the delightful cover art couldn't save this one. Sorry to be mean.
December 9, 2009
So, this was kind of a disappointment. This book came at such a high recommendation that I was expecting much better and more in-depth analysis of Sedaris' works than I really got. Most of Kopelson's "insights" were things I pretty much figured out for myself, and things I'm fairly sure most readers would be capable of figuring out for themselves as well. Kopelson skims along the surface of most of his points, providing neither thoughtful analysis if Sedaris' fiction nor his autobiographical essays. Occaisonally he touches on a comparison between the two, mentioning vaguely the influence Sedaris' family obviously had on his fiction, but doesn't bother to follow through. I admit I may have missed something by knowing nothing about Proust (and Kopelson quotes from Proust frequently and sometimes for pages at a time) but all in all I felt that reading this was a bit of a waste of time.
June 30, 2014
So, I don't know. I kind of had to look at this book as a combination of excepts of The Best of Davis Sedaris and an interesting way of reading all Sedaris characters as archetypes (of other Sedaris characters) and then a whole bunch of stuff about and lengthy quotes of Proust. Which is fine, but I have never read ANY Proust, so those parts kind of sucked for me, and, as I am not trying to impress anyone here, I skipped any Proust quote longer than 1/2 a page.
December 17, 2014
Not only does Kopelson appear to hate Sedaris's family even more than any of its actual members, he also seems to think that everything in Sedaris's stories is completely true. In fact, he thinks it's so true that he can catalog it and use it to complete an entire psychological profile of the guy. This book offers all that, plus several lengthy (multi-page) quotations from Proust.
June 23, 2011
could hardly finish it.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews