An Evening with David Sedaris: Bestselling Author & Humorist

David Sedaris is one of America’s pre-eminent humour writers. He is a master of satire and one of today’s most observant writers.

Beloved for his personal essays and short stories, David Sedaris is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Barrel Fever, Holidays on Ice, Naked, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, Calypso, and Happy-Go-Lucky. The audio version of Happy-Go-Lucky, written and narrated by Sedaris, won the 2023 Audie Award. His book The Best of Me collects 42 previously published stories and essays. Sedaris also wrote Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary, a collection of fables with illustrations by Ian Falconer. His next book of essays will be The Land and Its People (Back Bay Books, May 26, 2026).

In The Land and Its People, his first new collection since Happy-Go-Lucky, David Sedaris reflects on what it means to be a foreigner, a brother, a lifelong friend. He tries on the role of caretaker after his boyfriend Hugh’s hip replacement surgery, and both succeeds and fails. He buys his sister a cape and discusses his brother with a jaded Duolingo bot. He walks dozens of miles with his friend Dawn and challenges her to eat a truck tyre. Ever adding to his list of “Countries I Have Been To,” he rides a horse named Tequila in Guatemala, buys a bespoke priest’s cassock in Vatican City, and goes on safari in Kenya without taking a single photo.

There is sadness here—scrolling through his address book, he realises how many dear friends are now deceased—but also delight: he revels in authors’ biographies, the malapropism that becomes a decades-long inside joke, and a pair of well-made cotton underpants. He is bitten by a dog. A train passenger vomits in his face. A woman on the street late at night either sexually harasses him or doesn’t. Look how hard it is to be alive!

Throughout these essays—at once acerbic and tender, playful and profound—Sedaris shows how much there is to marvel at when you keep your head up and your eyes open, observing with warmth and curiosity this fascinating human species and the lands we inhabit.