More than just a bookstore, DC’s Lambda Rising (1625 Connecticut Ave., NW,) functions also as a community center and intellectual resource for the capital’s queer residents. Please continue to support it by buying this and other titles on their website or at the TNG shelf at their brick and mortar location. If you do the latter you get to chat with their employees, which I promise is always a pleasant experience.

I’m taking a deep breath. I’m sitting down. I’m pulling up my shades and filling my moat. All because I have to say something: I don’t think that gay humorist David Sedaris is really all that funny anymore. Phew. That feels better to admit it out loud. “Me Talk Pretty Some Day” didn’t exactly do it for me, and after the meta-confessionals that made up “Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim” he lost me for good. But before that? I would have napped in traffic for David Sedaris. And I would’ve worn a bacon coat to the pound or skinny dipped in the holy water at a Southern church for an ounce of his writing talent. His early books mix laugh-out-loud hilarity with a genuine sadness that always keep them interesting, and keep you on your toes in anticipation of which raw emotion Sedaris would slyly unearth. 

And in my opinion, his absolutele high-water mark as a writer was his 1997 collection Naked, which treats subjects from an aging greek Grandmother to a a trip to a nudist camp as personal tours through the authors own defensively comedic inner workings. It was all downhill from here, but he had a long, long way to fall. 

Support your local bookstore today by purchasing this book at LambdaRising.com.