The Land and Its People: Essays
David Sedaris's new collection finds him nursing Hugh through hip surgery, wrestling a Duolingo app for the words to describe his own family, and counting the names in his contacts he's already outlived. The comic travel dispatches are intact. What's new is the mortality running underneath them.
From the review
The premise of a Sedaris collection never changes and somehow never wears thin. A man pays close, faintly malicious attention to the world and brings back the things the rest of us were too polite to write down. What he's added over the years is mortality. He's still riding a horse named Tequila through Guatemala and commissioning himself a custom priest's cassock in Vatican City, but an undertow has crept in. In one piece he scrolls his contacts, tallying which friends he couldn't bear to bury, then notices how many of those names already belong to the dead. That's the move that lifts the book past comic dispatch. The jokes haven't gone soft. The stakes under them have risen.
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