Let’s be honest: when a new David Sedaris book lands, a certain segment of readers experiences a tiny, guilty sigh. Not because they won’t enjoy it, but because they know exactly what they’re in for - anecdotes about people putting feet on furniture and other minor infractions that somehow become comic gold. The Land and Its People, Sedaris’s tenth essay collection (some previously in the New Yorker), leans hard into the crankiness, and the critic confesses that the shtick feels a bit thinner than before. After nine volumes, the well of usable memoir material should be dry, right?

Wrong, apparently. There’s still plenty of good stuff, alongside some passages that an editor might have flagged - if Sedaris, who has sold over 16 million books, were still taking notes from editors. The review invokes a wonderful J.K. Rowling analogy: some sentences make you imagine an editor starting to dial the author’s number, then slowly putting down the handset. For superfans, the formula works fine. For the less devoted, reading Sedaris is now a glitchier experience - still funny, but with more static between the laughs.