Buy this audiobook if only to hear Mary Louise Parker read an Amy Hempel story.

This is a short story collection edited by David Sedaris, and the forward is enough to make you laugh hysterically.

Favorite stories were Best of Betty (Jincy Willett), The Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried (Amy Hempel) and Half A Grapefruit (Alice Munro). All had an off the wall humor that is too clever to see coming. Revelation (Flannery O'Connor) is stellar, and I suspect that all work has the feeling of being so realistic that it becomes real, plain to see, rather than a reflection of real. A Bullet in the Brain (Tobias Wolfe) is exactly how I daydream, mixing heady thoughts and memories with excruciatingly fine imaginary details.

Listened to the audiobook, which only had 5 of the stories, but I loved them all so much, I'm hesitant to read the rest in print because I seem to have such bad luck with short stories. Once again, thanks David Sedaris!

I did not love this collection of short stories - I was fooled by thinking that David Sedaris would be narcissistic enough to choose writers who followed in his own vein of darkly sardonic, wry observation. Writers who use the "tears-of-a-clown" method of coping with anxiety and social awkwardness - making pain funny by laughing it off. I was mistaken.

Sedaris selected writers who take a raw, humorless approach to their neuroses. These stories dive right into the characters' fears and frustrations, nerves and discomforts. As reader, you are pulled deep into the inner worlds of average people you might pass on the street without ever thinking of what's going on inside their scrunched faces, nails biting into palms, and muscles clenched beneath their pristine clothes.

You see the family ties of a woman who has left the country for the big city and cannot communicate her satisfaction with such a wild transplant to her sister, her own flesh and blood.

You hear children's hushed gossip following the wild lesson plan of a substitute teacher, whose facts are a fine blend of truth and liberal interpretation of truth.

You watch the unfurling final memories of a man approaching death in his last seconds, listening to his love of strange words, the echoes that reverb through his broken brain.

You eavesdrop on the private thoughts of an unlikely, lonely lover and his struggles to fit in to an adopted country.

...And you stand back before a dizzying kaleidoscope of thoughts and fears and smells and feelings as a young woman, unnamed, tells the story of entertaining a friend whose terminal illness has confined her to a sterile room in a hospital. The voice is California-casual, but the content and delivery is deadly serious.

I will probably never read Amy Hempel's 'In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried' ever again, as it left me gutted and crying on public transit and cast a dark cloud over my mood for a whole day, but it was certainly an unforgettable experience.

Stories not at all to my taste, but an undeniably admirable gathering from a technical point of view.

I liked the later stories best, but overall, didn't love it.

I found it hard to connect with the characters only getting such short snippets of their stories, not really my style but still enjoyable to read

I'll admit it: after reading a few reviews on this book, I was a little concerned. Could David Sedaris actually have bad taste in short stories? But no, of course not! This collection is perfect. I've never been much of a short story reader, preferring instead to stick to the novels with their introductions, their character-building, their stunning climaxes... how can you fit all of that into a short story? And indeed, many of the complaints about the stories in this collection fixate on the idea that nothing happens, that they are boring. Sure, these aren't sweeping epics, but they ARE a beautiful glimpse into what it means to be human and, more importantly, what it means to live. We have the desperate need for affection, attention, acceptance and love in the stories from Yates, Lahiri, Thompson, and Highsmith. We find the depths of contemplation, loneliness and despair in Willett, Oates, Moore, and Hempel. Johnston and Wolff show us about the end of a life. Some of these authors broke my heart, while others had me grinning, caught up in the simple joy of a short story done right. My "Want to Read" list has grown by leaps and bounds. Sedaris would never steer you in the wrong direction.

Het beste van het hele boek is de titel.

(Verder een beetje teleurgesteld. Onderstaande passage was het dan wel weer waard, maar het enige noemenswaardige.)

“It is worth noting what Anders did not remember, given what he did remember. He did not remember his first lover, Sherry, or what he had most madly loved about her, before it came to irritate him—her unembarrassed carnality, and especially the cordial way she had with his unit, which she called Mr. Mole, as in “Uh-oh, looks like Mr. Mole wants to play,” and “Let’s hide Mr. Mole!” Anders did not remember his wife, whom he had also loved before she exhausted him with her predictability, or his daughter, now a sullen professor of economics at Dartmouth. He did not remember standing just outside his daughter’s door as she lectured her bear about his naughtiness and described the truly appalling punishments Paws would receive unless he changed his ways. He did not remember a single line of the hundreds of poems he had committed to memory in his youth so that he could give himself the shivers at will—not “Silent, upon a peak in Darien,” or “My God, I heard this day,” or “All my pretty ones? Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?” None of these did he remember; not one. Anders did not remember his dying mother saying of his father, “I should have stabbed him in his sleep.”
He did not remember Professor Josephs telling his class how Athenian prisoners in Sicily had been released if they could recite Aeschylus, and then reciting Aeschylus himself, right there, in the Greek. Anders did not remember how his eyes had burned at those sounds. He did not remember the surprise of seeing a college class-mate’s name on the jacket of a novel not long after they graduated, or the respect he had felt after reading the book. He did not remember the pleasure of giving respect.
Nor did Anders remember seeing a woman leap to her death from the building opposite his own just days after his daughter was born. He did not remember shouting, “Lord have mercy!” He did not remember deliberately crashing his father’s car into a tree, or having his ribs kicked in by three policemen at an anti-war rally, or waking himself up with laughter. He did not remember when he began to regard the heap of books on his desk with boredom and dread, or when he grew angry at writers for writing them. He did not remember when everything began to remind him of something else.
This is what he remembered. Heat. A baseball field. Yellow grass, the whirr of insects, himself leaning against a tree as the boys of the neighborhood gather for a pickup game.”

*really* liked some of them, but for others... I wish there had been introductions by Sedaris to say what he loves about them (these being a collection of his favorites). i'm afraid i missed what was great about some of them, but in general really glad i read it.

Finally checked out this collection, anthologized and edited by my favorite dark humorist, the incomparable, and always fashionable, David Sedaris. There are some really robust and unique stories here. It’s fun to read things an author you love, loves. I adore Sedaris and anything he’s attached to.

Looks like I share a similar taste in the short story with Mr. Sedaris.