Naked.

If satire were a more revered literary tradition David Sedaris would be considered an American master, and we might at last lay to rest all those overused references to James Thurber and Nathanael West. While we await Sedaris's ascension into the literary pantheon, we can entertain ourselves with his crafty, magnificently demented life stories.

Sedaris's second collection of stories is a hilarious heap of autobiography that recounts a gay childhood governed by a crabby, whiskey-soaked mother, followed by an adult life plagued with trailer trash and born-again wackos. His father is a boorish numskull, his siblings delinquents and tarts, and his employers (one of them a lecherous Christian who makes jade clocks in the shape of the state of Oregon) a scary pack of losers.

But if much of his humor is wrought at the expense of the weak, stupid people he depicts in Naked, then it is often spent at his own expense as well. Sedaris reveals his own idiosyncrasies with cool candor and something approaching pride: In the story "A Plague of Tics," he describes a young lifetime spent jerking and twitching and even licking light switches. In "C.O.G." and "Something for Everyone," he discusses his failed academic career and his series of dead-end jobs. In all his stories--as with Sedaris's popular commentaries on National Public Radio--there's a candidness that's not so much self-deprecation as true confession.

Despite all this caustic commentary, Sedaris's observations are not without their own peculiar warmth. In "I Like Guys," he reflects on the inequities of homophobia in a story set against a background of racial integration at a public school. In "Ashes," he mourns the loss of his mother to cancer. These stories are wrapped in the same mordant humor that makes this book (and its predecessor, Barrel Fever, which was the basis for 1996's popular off-Broadway holiday play The SantaLand Diaries) so frantically funny. Yet both books stray briefly outside Sedaris's corrosive construct to make it clear that he has a heart.

Sedaris rarely addresses his homosexuality head-on, though it looms like a skyscraper throughout. He's cornered by strangers offering him a ride ("`I don't mean to pry,' the driver said, `but are you by any chance a faggot?'"); singled out by employers ("`I knew it the first time I saw you operate a sander. I said, "That guy is sick."'"); even insulted by the patients at the asylum where he volunteers ("`Faggot!' a woman shouted, stooping to protect her collection of pinecones. `Get your faggoty hands away from my radio transmitters.'").

Sedaris handles all of these assaults with equal aplomb. In "I Like Guys," he turns the anguish of preteen homophobia into a laugh riot: "I told myself that I would find a girlfriend in Greece. She would be a French tourist wandering the beach with a loaf of bread beneath her arm. Lisette would prove that I wasn't a homosexual, but a man with refined tastes."

All these murky memories and high-concept stories are culled from Sedaris's own odd life. But his curmudgeonly comic genius and outrageous wit make them our own as well, a wacked-out set of scenes from our all-too-familiar world.