Theft by Finding, David Sedaris
Theft by Finding, David Sedaris
116 Rating(s)
List: $31.99 | Sale: $22.40
Club: $15.99

Theft by Finding
Diaries (1977-2002)

Bestseller

Author: David Sedaris

Narrator: David Sedaris

Unabridged: 13 hr 52 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/30/2017

Synopsis

One of the most anticipated books of 2017: Boston Globe, New York Times Book Review, New York's "Vulture", The Week, Bustle, BookRiot
An NPR Best Book of 2017An AV Club Favorite Book of 2017A Barnes & Noble Best Book of 2017A Goodreads Choice Awards nominee

David Sedaris tells all in a book that is, literally, a lifetime in the making.

For forty years, David Sedaris has kept a diary in which he records everything that captures his attention-overheard comments, salacious gossip, soap opera plot twists, secrets confided by total strangers. These observations are the source code for his finest work, and through them he has honed his cunning, surprising sentences.

Now, Sedaris shares his private writings with the world. Theft by Finding, the first of two volumes, is the story of how a drug-abusing dropout with a weakness for the International House of Pancakes and a chronic inability to hold down a real job became one of the funniest people on the planet.

Written with a sharp eye and ear for the bizarre, the beautiful, and the uncomfortable, and with a generosity of spirit that even a misanthropic sense of humor can't fully disguise, Theft By Finding proves that Sedaris is one of our great modern observers. It's a potent reminder that when you're as perceptive and curious as Sedaris, there's no such thing as a boring day.

About David Sedaris

American comedian, David Sedaris, decided to put his good humor and social critiques to pen and has we authored several books and short essays that slice through cultural inadequacies and political correctness. He has been deemed a master of satire and an expert observer of the current human condition. He was born in 1956, and has many titles......humorist, comedian, author, and radio contributor. He gives credit to radio host, Ira Glass, for discovering him in a Chicago club and giving him the invaluable opportunity to appear on his weekly radio program. He said it was life changing.

One of his most important accomplishments would be receiving a Grammy nomination for his audio version of, Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls. There are over ten million copies of his books, and they have been translated into 25 languages.

In collaboration with his sister, Amy Sedaris, David has written six plays that have been produced at such places as LA Mama, Lincoln Center, and The Drama Department in New York City. Three have been nominated for Grammys for Best Spoken Word and Best Comedy Album. A recent work is David Sedaris: Live for Your Listening Pleasure. He has also had a film adaptation of his story C. O.G., which was presented at Sundance Film Festival. The various books about him and by him are numerous. Calypso, a book of essays, was punished in 2018, and a second volume of diaries is expected in summer of 2019.

His older Santaland Diaries was a huge success for listeners, so much so, that the New York Times dubbed him "a minor phenomenon".

Reviews

Goodreads review by Shawn on July 15, 2017

It's a free country. Anybody can write about any old thing they want in their diary, of course. But it is beyond me why in this highly selective published version of his Sedaris would choose to include so many—dozens and dozens of—entries that record in great othering detail his observations of disa......more

Goodreads review by Trin on April 18, 2017

David Sedaris is so authentically David Sedaris. This first collection of his diaries reveal him as everything you'd expect, and want, him to be, and reading it only made me love him more. The feeling of being in the backseat (or perched on the handlebars of his bike, perhaps) as he struggles throug......more

Goodreads review by britt_brooke on April 29, 2019

I read this in print upon publication in 2017, but I’ve been working on the interior of our house, and well, Sedaris on audio is ALWAYS a great distraction. So, I’ve been doing a bit of audio multitasking lately. I was fortunate enough to meet this delightful weirdo (twice) and get my book signed. H......more

Goodreads review by Tom on July 10, 2020

Less laughs than I wanted, but also a lot more endearing than I expected. This is not the place to start with Sedaris, but as an already-fan I found his sensitivity refreshing and his soul-baring unexpectedly poignant. Unfortunately the diary format doesn't lend itself to sustained reading and as I......more

Quotes

PRAISE FOR THEFT BY FINDING:

"Starve and Struggle. Feast. Bloat. These are the three stages that all artists - with some variation - go through in their careers...So it's encouraging to read 25 years of David Sedaris's diaries, and not just because he manages to defeat Bloat. It's helpful to see that a voice as original, hilarious and sometimes as infuriating as his was put through the same Struggle and Starve meat grinder that most of us go through...No one escapes Bloat, but many survive it. Maybe not with the grace, whining, hilarity and eye-rolling that Sedaris does. But through all 25 years of "Theft by Finding" - of soap opera addictions and spider feeding, family kookiness and language lessons - Sedaris's developing voice is the lifeline that pulls him through the murk."
—Patton Oswalt, New York Times Book Review

"If it's hard to be funny, it's an astounding feat to stay funny--wildly, wickedly, ingeniously so--for more than twenty years. Yet David Sedaris has somehow pulled it off, in exhilarating essays that zero in on the absurd and the poignant with eviscerating wit and radiant humanity....Fans will no doubt delight in the entries that will turn into Sedaris's most beloved essays...We're treated to a portrait of the artist as a young man, albeit one with an old and singular soul."
—Fiona Maazel, O, The Oprah Magazine

"A standout... Whether he's in an IHOP in Raleigh or his apartment in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, his eye for the absurd and the vulgar is infallible and his deadpan prose style inimitable...Here, the relatively artless diary entries, short and long, sequenced and non sequitur, add up to something we've never gotten before--a big, juicy narrative arc. It comprises 25 years of an essentially heartwarming success story, any potential ickiness kept in check by Sedaris's judicious minimalism."
—Marion Winik, Newsday

"Mesmerizing... Delightful... Sedaris describes the world around him... the vast and splendid array of human life that can be observed at IHOP, or the vagaries of fruit picking... Reading Theft by Finding is like watching a favorite play from behind the scenes, in the company of a friend who can identify what is absurd and heartbreaking and human about every person on stage."
—Annalisa Quinn, NPR

"Sedaris, a master of incisive and comic cultural criticism, is about to get more personal than ever...Theft by Finding reveals intimate details of this literary luminary's life and mind--all told with his singular sense of humor."
—Harper's Bazaar

"Sedaris fans will thrill to this opportunity to poke around in the writer's personal diaries, which he has faithfully kept for four decades and used as raw material for his hilarious nonfiction as well as his performances."
—Paul S. Makishima, Boston Globe

"If you've had the good fortune of seeing Sedaris on tour, you've probably heard him read from one of his snarky and hilariously solipsistic diary entries. Finally, they're collected in one place for the first time."
—Entertainment Weekly

"Randomly open to any page of Theft by Finding and you'll find a gem... Sedaris's gift is to make you stop and think one moment and laugh out loud the next."—Rob Merrill, Associated Press

"Here, in these as-it-happened accounts and jottings, is a rich chunk of the mother lode from which David Sedaris has mined his personal essays and performances. The extracts in Theft by Finding cover what may be called the disconsolate IHOP years, when he was a college dropout, rootless casual worker and aspiring artist, and those during which he became a celebrity.... The appeal of these diary entries lies in their spareness and in Sedaris's boundless relish for the absurdity of life.... The Sedaris of these diaries is, above all, a connoisseur of annoying things and of bothersome and downright dreadful people."
—Katherine A. Powers, Washington Post

"This is Sedaris, who can be wickedly funny as well as deliciously insightful about modern mores - so the nuggets are big and shiny and well worth panning for... His eccentric existence is eminently enthralling."—David Holahan, USA Today

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