Barrel Fever cover art

Barrel Fever

 Preview

Audible Standard 30-day free trial

Try Standard free
Select 1 audiobook a month from our entire collection.
Listen to your selected audiobooks as long as you're a member.
Get unlimited access to bingeable podcasts.
Standard auto renews for £5.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Barrel Fever

By: David Sedaris
Narrated by: David Sedaris
Try Standard free

£5.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for £9.34

Buy Now for £9.34

About this listen

 In David Sedaris's world, no one is safe and no cow is sacred. A manic cross between Mark Leyner, Fran Lebowitz and the National Enquirer, Sedaris's collection of stories and essays is a rollicking tour through the American Zeitgeist: a man who is loved too much flees the heavyweight champion of the world; a teenage suicide tried to incite a lynch mob at her funeral; and in his essays, David Sedaris considers the hazards of rewards of smoking, writing for Giantess magazine, and living with his scrappy brother Paul, aka 'The Rooster'.

With a perfect eye and a voice infused with as much empathy as wit, Sedaris writes and reads stories and essays that target the soulful ridiculousness of our behaviour. Barrel Fever is like a blind date with modern life - and anything can happen.©1998 David Sedaris Entertainment & Celebrities Fiction Literature & Fiction Satire Short Story Comedy

Critic reviews

So often Sedaris's phrasing is beautiful in its piquancy and minimalism...His life is extraordinary in so many ways - the drug addiction, the eccentric family, the crazy jobs, the fame, the globetrotting - but one of the more unlikely achievements here is in making it all seem quite ordinary. Ultimately, his masterstroke is in acting as a bystander in his own story
He makes me laugh so much. In an era when US satire is outpacing our own he's a sharp, humane and hilarious voice that never fails to make you smile - and sometimes weep. Apparently effortless humour is difficult, and precious. He's the real thing (James Naughtie)
A deadpan, darkly comical portrait of the American underbelly . . . Sedaris shares something of [Alan] Bennett's detached curiosity, and they both have a thirst for amusement (Craig Brown)
I don't very often find myself moved by a book to emit loud noises in public, but when I first read David Sedaris's essays and short stories, they made me laugh so hard I had to stop taking them on the tube. All his collections are good but 'Barrel Fever
#NAME?
New YORKER
BOSTON Globe
All stars
Most relevant
I can’t express enough how glad I am to have David Sedaris in my life!

Fabulous!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Big Sedaris fan but this wasn’t his best work and was left a bit disappointed by this

Well…

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
very descriptive narrations , funny and addictive .Performances are hilarious. Snort laughing humor . going to read the entire back catalogue

beautifully Weird

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I love David Sedaris’s autobiographical books, but I didn’t enjoy this one. For some reason, the humor that works for real events, doesn’t work for fiction (for me at least). Also, the book is quite short and the stories are more like short anecdotes that might be funny in a standup act, but don’t work well in an audiobook.

Too short. Too disjointed.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I don’t know that this is supposed to be. Maybe a David ran out of real life stories and started to make them up instead.

As much as I’ve enjoyed his other offerings, this was simply just annoying. And sometimes just mean for its own sake. That’s fine. And it can be funny. But by the tenth time a cheap shot is being taken without any insight to redeem it, it just reads as lazy.

Purely annoying.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.