After several extended stays in a little Norman village and in Paris, Sedaris had progressed, he observes, ''from speaking like an evil baby to speaking like a hillbilly. Sedaris also writes here about the time he spent in France and the difficulty of learning another language. Sedaris suggests that his father's punishment for being overly involved in his kids' artistic lives is David's brother Paul, otherwise known as ''The Rooster,'' a half-literate miscreant whose language is outrageously profane. Lou is a micromanager who tries to get his uninterested children to form a jazz combo and, when that fails, insists on boosting David's career as a performance artist by heckling him from the audience.

Many of the 27 short essays collected here (which appeared originally in the New Yorker, Esquire and elsewhere) deal with his father, Lou, to whom the book is dedicated. Entertainment Weekly on Barrel Fever Sidesplitting Not one of the essays in this new collection failed to crack me up frequently I was helpless.Sedaris is Garrison Keillor's evil twin: like the Minnesota humorist, Sedaris (Naked) focuses on the icy patches that mar life's sidewalk, though the ice in his work is much more slippery and the falls much more spectacularly funny than in Keillor's. 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 had a love child. Sedariss essays on living in Paris are some of the funniest hes ever written. Sedaris is an amazing reader whose appearances draw hundreds, and his performancesincluding a jaw-dropping impression of Billie Holiday singing I wish I were an Oscar Meyer weinerare unforgettable. Compared by The New Yorker to Twain and Hawthorne, Sedaris has become one of our best-loved authors. 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.

You Cant Kill the Rooster is a portrait of his brother who talks incessant hip-hop slang to his bewildered father. His recent move to Paris has inspired hilarious pieces, including Me Talk Pretty One Day, about his attempts to learn French. A new collection from David Sedaris is cause for jubilation.

Me talk pretty one day by david sedaris