Sedaris's move to Paris in the early aughts inspired hilarious pieces, such as "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 is one of America's best-loved authors, and his biting essays on living in Paris are some of the funniest he's 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 a love child.