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    Me Talk Pretty One Day
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    Me Talk Pretty One Day
    Unavailable
    Me Talk Pretty One Day
    Audiobook5 hours

    Me Talk Pretty One Day

    Published by Hachette Audio

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    A new collection from David Sedaris is cause for jubilation. His recent move to Paris has inspired hilarious pieces, including Me Talk Pretty One Day, about his attempts to learn French. His family is another inspiration. You Cant Kill the Rooster is a portrait of his brother who talks incessant hip-hop slang to his bewildered father. And no one hones a finer fury in response to such modern annoyances as restaurant meals presented in ludicrous towers and cashiers with 6-inch fingernails. Compared by The New Yorker to Twain and Hawthorne, Sedaris has become one of our best-loved authors. Sedaris is an amazing reader whose appearances draw hundreds, and his performancesincluding a jaw-dropping impression of Billie Holiday singing I wish I were an Oscar Meyer weinerare unforgettable. Sedariss essays on living in Paris are some of the funniest hes ever written. At last, someone even meaner than the French! The sort of blithely sophisticated, loopy humour that might have resulted if Dorothy Parker and James Thurber had had a love child. Entertainment Weekly on Barrel Fever Sidesplitting Not one of the essays in this new collection failed to crack me up; frequently I was helpless. The New York Times Book Review on Naked

    Editor's Note

    Hilarious…

    David Sedaris is the master of self-deprecation, and this collection of stories — many of them about his father, Lou — will make you laugh so much, you will probably cry. This audio version, narrated by Sedaris (who talks pretty!), far surpasses the written version.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHachette Audio
    Release dateApr 1, 2006
    ISBN9781594836855
    Unavailable
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    Reviews for Me Talk Pretty One Day

    4/5

    6,435 ratings222 reviews

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    • 4/5
      David Sedaris is hilarious, as always. His brilliant combination of reality, humor, and relatability makes for a fun read that I will revisit often.
    • 3/5
      It's hard to think about reading Sedaris outside of the context of his current megafame. These days, seeing his name in the New Yorker and hearing his voice on This American Life every week has made him feel formulaic to me, but when I read this years ago when it came out, his was a hilarious, exciting voice that I hadn't encountered before. I do love Sedaris's self-deprecation and his deftness at constructing a story, and he (used to) make me laugh out loud as I read. If you're not oversaturated, or if you're lucky enough to be new to Sedaris, read this book, which I think is his best.
    • 5/5
      Well, I guess it's no surprise that my sense of humour is different from most people. I really enjoyed these short stories and I had lots of laugh out loud moments. I actually had to flag one paragraph so I could reproduce it here: SoHo is not a macaroni salad kind of place. This is where the world's brightest young talents come to braise carmelized racks of corn-fed songbirds or offer up their famous knuckle of flash-seared crappie served with a collar of chided ginger and cornered by a tribe of kiln-roasted Chilean toadstools, teased with a warm spray of clarified musk oil. Even when they promise something simple, they've got to tart it up--the meatloaf has been poached in seawater, or there are figs in the tuna salad. If cooking is an art, I think we're in our Dada phase. (This is from the story Today's Special which ends with David leaving the restaurant unfulfilled and has to buy a hotdog from a vendor before going to the movie.) I think it takes great talent to write a satisfying short story, far greater than writing a novel. David Sedaris may be one of those few who can do it superbly.
    • 4/5
      Hilarious! David Sedaris has a sharp wit and thinks of the silliest things to point out. He kept me laughing.
    • 3/5
      I heard a very funny thing on Radio 4 where a classy American woman of a certain age was monologuing. The next time it was on I caught the beginning and was shocked to realise this woman was actually a very camp man. Suddenly everything she had said about her husband took on a new dimension. So I read the book. There's some very funny stuff here, the opening paragraph of The Great Leap Forward being the stand-out for me. I would recommend listening to him first as he has a certain something to his delivery that isn't apparent on the page.
    • 5/5
      hysterical!
    • 3/5
      First of all, Sedaris' narration of his own work is stellar. And this collection of memoir-essays made me chuckle out loud several times. It also made me moan with apathy at times. Sedaris is persistently self-deprecating and that grows old. He is also a keen observer of human behavior and a hilarious recounter of irreverent internal dialogue. He is at his best when he is translating from translation or simply telling a story of, say, a visit to a doctor's office. His rendition of his middle-American father's voice creates a palpable character and his dissection of the American culture is precise. Both ring drolly true. (Both drolly ring true?) Too often in this collection a whiny, self-absorbed narrator upstages the brilliant and entertaining Sedaris. But still. If you need a distracting and amusing audiobook, I can certainly recommend Me Talk Pretty One Day.
    • 4/5
      Hilarious.
    • 5/5
      Ridiculously laugh-out-loud funny.
    • 5/5
      Pretty damn funny!
    • 4/5
      Hilarious!
    • 3/5
      Some hilarious - especially the parts about grammatical gender in French - but equally many that didn't interest me very much.
    • 5/5
      classic sedaris!
    • 3/5
      Not all the chapters were laugh-out-loud funny, but most of them inspired a chuckle or two. I enjoyed the second part much more than the first with my favorite essays unquestionably being the ones where he discusses learning French in Paris.
    • 3/5
      Most of this book just got little chuckles out of me here and there. I just couldn't like the author, so that might be part of the reason I didn't like it more than I did. I would have given this two stars, but I had to bump it up to three because one chapter had me crying with laughter. Too bad those three pages were the only ones in the book that made me laugh like that.

      I added this book to my tear jerkers shelf, which was intended to be only for sad books, but I decided I could add in books that make me cry with laughter too.
    • 4/5
      I think my expectations were too high for this book. I got what I wanted out of it, I laughed out loud. Many times. But the writing during the in-between times was just okay. What I like about Sedaris, and this is the first book I've read by him, is that he is not pretentious at all, which I was half-expecting, so I was pleasantly surprised by some gems like this: "A year after my graduation from the School of Art Institute of Chicago, a terrible mistake was made and I was offered a position teaching a writing workshop." I just love that.
      The first third of the book was the best which was about his family. The very end of the book was putting me to sleep.
    • 2/5
      A slapstick clowning of life experiences which seems to be coming from a bitchy and sarcastic middle-aged man. The book does have its share of good humor and wit, yet it is just a feeble attempt to make a mockery of people from a childish mind.
    • 5/5
      This book is super funny and worth a read. I loved it. It's so odd and sick that you have no choice but to laugh.
    • 4/5
      I do love David Sedaris and really loved some of the chapters of this book. But overall I found it a bit disappointing compared to his other books. The transition from his past life in the States to his current life in France was rough and at times it seemed like he had just taken some stories and pasted them into a book instead of trying to make a cohesive unit out of them. And why on earth did he choose to end with the last story about his dad eating rotten food when he'd been focusing on himself for the last 100 pages?
    • 5/5
      i stumbled across a beat-up copy of this one at a used bookstore, and bought it off of the recommendation of a classmate with a rather sarcastic sense of humor. the book was probably beat up from its former owner dropping it all the time after laughing too hard to keep a hold of it. arranged in a series of vignettes that can be read in any order (though there are several in-jokes that become apparent as you read, this one can certainly be devoured in sporadic little short-story-sized bites), it takes a little while to get used to Sedaris' style of humor. utterly self-deprecating and weirdly quirky, once you get in to it, these tales induce the sort of laughter that make other people stare at the crazy chick cackling like a drug fiend. good times.
    • 5/5
      I love this book. It's even better on audio, as you can hear how he reads the essays - funny as hell.
    • 4/5
      Me Talk Pretty One Day wasn't exactly what I was expecting when I picked it up to read. I'm not sure what I thought it'd be, but the varying vignettes took me a hair by surprise.Because of the title, I thought there would be more dealing with Sedaris' speech therapy as a child, but after the first chapter I heard nothing about it, which bothered me a little bit. Sure, the reference to "talking pretty one day" came around later in the French-speaking segments.I didn't find a lot of connection between many of the vignettes, though, which was probably part of the point, but... while the book was funny, the lack of connectedness bugged me a bit.I laughed aloud a fair number of times while I was reading, though nothing felt profound enough for me to actually highlight in my e-reader. It was a fun read, and it was hard to put down in order to sleep at night. I enjoyed my first foray into Sedaris, even if I did want the vignettes to connect more solidly. I hate feeling like I missed something as I read.
    • 5/5
      I really enjoy Mr. Sedaris' take on life and the world around him. The essays that take place during his childhood are not my favorites, but once he moves on to his adult experiences...I fall in laughter with him. Sharp, witty, and oh so amusing!
    • 4/5
      David Sedaris is awesome! Some of these stories had me literally laughing out loud. I loved it! I wish the other stories were all that great, but regardless it was a quick, fun read.
    • 4/5
      As always with biographical material, listening to it read by the author adds so much to it. That said, I lost interest in the middle of the book. I was ready to completely pan the entire book except for the first chapter, when David began on his father's food hoarding habits and then medical care in France. The last half or so of the book were laugh out loud. Warning: this is not a book for the homophobic.
    • 5/5
      OMFG I love this book. I laughed so much reading this that at one point someone asked me if I was OK or needed help. Hilarious.
    • 3/5
      If you can, listen to this as an audiobook. David Sedaris is one of the best out there.
    • 4/5
      Me Talk Pretty One Day, a collection of short stories by David Sedaris, is a book of character. The genre of creative non-fiction is beautifully interpreted in this book. Through many, very different short stories this book takes the reader on a journey through bits and pieces of the author's life. The stories Serdaris chooses to put in the book allow the audience to meet and learn about some of the "main characters" of Sedaris' life in a multifaceted way. In this book the reader is taken through a journey of Sedaris' childhood where you meet his quirky parents, many pets, and villainous teachers. His college years, where you experience with him his post high-school struggles, some of his adult life in New York, and finally you go with Sedaris on some of his seemingly many adventures with France. This book is sure to make you smile and laugh as you take a glimpse into the universe of a witty, odd, once-lisped, gay, Greek, American man who has had (like most of us) a conventionally unconventional and interesting life. I would recommended this book to anyone.
    • 4/5
      This book made me smile or laugh once or twice every hundred pages or so, much like Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim did. I'm not sure it was worth it, as I was relieved when I finished it. Part one is certainly a lot better than part deux.
    • 4/5
      Quick read -- good book. Extremely entertaining with witty observations about growing up as an odd, but very talented (and self deprecating) young man.