Naked

David Sedaris' remarkable new collection of essays, Naked, runs the gamut from the hysterical to the terrifying, the merely humiliating to the genuinely disturbing. We follow Sedaris from his youthful memories of his bout with an unrecognized obsessive-compulsive disorder, through his painful awakening into his own sexuality, to the final, title essay, in which Sedaris' visit to a nudist resort at last brings him face to face with the -- well, nakedness -- of himself and everyone around him. And despite the pain involved in all of these revelations, Sedaris never fails to be insightful and wickedly funny.

Sedaris manages to capture in the barest descriptions all of the tawdrinesses of modern family life. From his father's golf obsession to the bitter relationship between his mother and his grandmother, from the terror instilled in Sedaris and his five siblings by a cheap pornographic novel to the pain of coming to terms with their mother's impending death, this is a family most connected by its moments of perversity. They are at their level best when investigating who's been using the bath towels for distinctly unhygienic purposes, or when talking to the drunken prostitute their oldest daughter has brought home for dinner.

And Sedaris doesn't simply make fun of those around him; his most pointed barbs are reserved for describing his own foibles, from his teenage case of the drama bug to the frightening results of his penchant for hitchhiking. These essays, all in Sedaris' own archly funny voice, as haunting as they are witty, provide a shocking, fascinating glimpse of the writer's mind at work.