RaveThe Los Angeles TimesComposed of 12 stories and four essays, Barrel Fever is wacky writing par excellence: original, acid and wild ... Beneath their zany discontinuities, Sedaris’ characters are often painfully vulnerable, substituting a stubborn belief in the inevitability of a happy ending for clear sight. No one is more susceptible to this penchant than the author himself, as he switches from fiction to confessional essays at the end of Barrel Fever ... \'The SantaLand Diaries\' is an appropriate finale to Barrel Fever for it is both the funniest section of a very funny book and an example of what lifts Sedaris’ humor to a sweet and intellectual plane.
Rachel Ingalls
RaveThe New York Times (1986 review)\"...[a] concise, affecting and highly original work ... Mrs. Caliban never makes its points head-on, never strays from its intriguing confusions, never beats us over the head with meaning, but somehow we are moved. The book is a strange conversation overheard on a bus: sketchy, incomplete, maddening, but totally unforgettable ... Rachel Ingalls has created a tight, intriguing portrait of a woman\'s escape from unacceptable reality and presented an account of derangement so matter-of-fact, so ordinary and at the same time so bizarre, that through her words we experience new insight.\
