"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 through them he has honed his cunning, surprising sentences. Now, Sedaris shares his private writings with the world. Theft by Finding, the first of two volumes, is an 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. Most diaries--even the diaries of great writers--are impossibly dull, because they are generally about the authors' emotions, or their dreams, or their interior life. Sedaris's diaries are unique because they face outward. He doesn't tell us his feelings about the world; he shows us the world instead, and in so doing he shows us something deeper about himself. 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."--Jacket.