Get a first look at David Sedaris' new essay collection Happy-Go-Lucky
David Sedaris is taking it back to the beginning. After focusing on a diary collection and a best-of anthology, the beloved memoirist is releasing another new book of personal essays. Happy-Go-Lucky will publish May 31, and EW has all the details, starting with an exclusive cover reveal.
"This wasn't my first choice of a title," Sedaris tells EW of the new book. "The initial one was The Testicles of an Old Sparrow in Winter. It didn't really go with clowns, though, so I changed it."
The jacket art adheres to the aesthetic of Sedaris' previous covers, using a surreal, wacky photo in place of the more visually pleasing (but entirely un-Sedarian) patterns and colors that have taken over bookshelves. His past titles have used imagery of a chipmunk and squirrel having a romantic dinner, a hallucinogenic owl, a pair of fedora-clad men with their tongues out, and the iconic shot of a mall Santa using a urinal.
Little, Brown 'Happy-Go-Lucky,' by David Sedaris
"I just love this guy's makeup," Sedaris says of the clown gracing the new cover. "I also like that him, the dog, and the child are all looking in different directions."
Much like his best-selling previous essay collections, Happy-Go-Lucky will chronicle Sedaris' own life and the ways we live now, pulling from his daily interactions and observations of seemingly ordinary moments that instantly turn absurd. The author has spent the past two years in more of a stasis than ever before — Sedaris typically spends much of his time on the tour circuit, reading his work to large crowds across the globe — which readers can expect to see factored into his new essays.
"I'd give anything to be back in a s---ty hotel," he told EW in the summer of 2020, while also pointing out a few trends he certainly did not miss. "Civilization as we know it ends, but 'Welcome in' survives?" he joked.
Happy-Go-Lucky is available for preorder now.
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