David Sedaris - When You Are Engulfed in Flames

In an era of visual media saturation, eliciting a laugh-out-loud response is becoming increasingly harder for the print medium. Humorists have to work twice as hard for diminishing results.
While I often find the actual authenticity of David Sedaris' memoir writings questionable, it doesn't particularly matter whether they are true or not because they COULD happen and that is enough. His pieces, while undoubtably exagerated accounts, provide effective, identifiable associations for the reader.
When You Are Engulfed in Flames shows Sedaris' sharpest, wittiest, and most focused writings to date. The book has a coherency which his earlier books lacked. While this is a collection, there is something about the sequencing of the pieces and the overall flow that ties it together remarkably well.
He hits on familiar areas throughout the book; his familiy, his partner Hugh, childhood memories, and smoking. The final chapter, a longer bit entitled 'The Smoking Section,' is his best writing to date. Laid out with dynamics that are little short of verbally symphonic, he chronicles his struggle to quit smoking, laying out the particular pleasures, the crutch of the patch, and the curious void of self-fulfillment felt afterwards. His fight against nicotine addiction is set against the backdrop of his living experiences in Japan. Overlaying the experiences uniquely connects both subjects and gives each of them greater resonance. As he moves through an alien environment, trying to learn the language well enough to tell the difference between bottles of shampoo and baby lotion, he feels alien to himself without a cigarette between his lips. With humorous and practical examples, he dredges the notions of suffering and the desire for familiarity as he purposefully denies vices disguised as comforts.
Rather than go straight for a laugh, Sedaris nimbly dances with his accounts, using referential humor and honest human connection to paint scenes that pan the entire emotional landscape, often within a single ten page poigniant story.
Bonus points for the predictably awesome Chip Kidd cover.