Common Good Books hosts David Sedaris with Ariel Levy

Common Good Books is hosting David Sedaris for a reading and signing of his new book Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002 on Saturday, June 17th at 3:00pm. Tickets will be required for the reading portion, but everyone - ticket or not - will be able to meet him and get a book signed. Sedaris will be joined by New Yorker writer Ariel Levy, author of The Rules Do Not Apply.

• The reading portion is SOLD OUT. Tickets are $28.00 + tax and include one copy of David Sedaris' new book, Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977-2002).
• Ticket admits one.
• Mr. Sedaris will sign all his titles, but he will only sign books.
• All ticket holders will be given a book ON THE DAY OF THE EVENT.
• Absolutely no photography, recording, or video for the entire reading or signing.
• Don't despair if you don't get a ticket for the reading portion! Every person who would like to meet David Sedaris and have him sign books will be given the opportunity after the reading during the free portion of the event.

David Sedaris tells all in a book that is, literally, a lifetime in the making.

It's no coincidence that the world's best writers tend to keep diaries. If you faithfully record your life in a journal, you're writing every day--and if you write every day, you become a better writer. David Sedaris has kept a diary for forty years. This means that if you've kept a diary for a year of your life or less, Sedaris is at least forty times better at writing than you are.

In his diaries, he's recorded everything that has captured his attention--overheard comments, salacious gossip, soap opera plot twists, secrets confided by total strangers. These observations are the source code for his finest work, and with them he has honed his self-deprecation and learned to craft his cunning, surprising sentences.

Now, for the first time, Sedaris shares his private writings with the world in Theft By Finding: Diaries 1977-2002. This is the first-person account of how a drug-abusing dropout with a weakness for the International House of Pancakes and a chronic inability to hold down a real job became one of the funniest people on the planet.

Written with a sharp eye and ear for the bizarre, the beautiful, and the uncomfortable, and with a generosity of spirit that even a misanthropic sense of humor can't fully disguise, Theft By Finding proves that Sedaris is one of our great modern observers. It's a potent reminder that there's no such thing as a boring day--when you're as perceptive and curious as Sedaris, adventure waits around every corner.

David Sedaris is the author of the books Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Holidays on Ice, Naked, and Barrel Fever. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and BBC Radio 4. He lives in England.

A gorgeous memoir about a woman overcoming dramatic loss and finding reinvention--for readers of Cheryl Strayed and Joan Didion 

When Ariel Levy left for a reporting trip to Mongolia in 2012, she was pregnant, married, financially secure, and successful on her own terms. A month later, none of that was true. 

Levy picks you up and hurls you through the story of how she built an unconventional life and then watched it fall apart with astonishing speed. Like much of her generation, she was raised to resist traditional rules--about work, about love, and about womanhood. 

In this "deeply human and deeply moving" (The New York Times Book Review) memoir, Levy chronicles the adventure and heartbreak of being, in her own words, "a woman who is free to do whatever she chooses." Her story of resilience becomes an unforgettable portrait of the shifting forces in our culture, of what has changed--and of what is eternal. 

Ariel Levy joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2008, and received the National Magazine Award for Essays and Criticism in 2014 for her piece "Thanksgiving in Mongolia." She is the author of the book Female Chauvinist Pigs and was a contributing editor at New York for twelve years.