Amid the relative warmth with which China embraced the outside world during the 2008 Olympic Games, it was easy to forget what travel within that country used to be like. Just a couple of decades earlier, China was about as welcoming to foreigners as a Florida swamp full of half-starved crocodiles.

The country’s impenetrability, of course, made it appealing to adventure travelers, many of whom turned their experiences into books. One online bibliography published before the Olympics lists no fewer than 14 titles, ranging from Paul Theroux’s Riding the Iron Rooster to Colin Thubron’s Behind the Wall: A Journey Through China. Now comes Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven, a quirky addition to the genre by a writer who, unlike a Theroux or a Peter Hessler (River Town), was neither a seasoned adventure traveler nor a Sinophile when she visited China in 1986.

In fact, Susan Jane Gilman didn’t speak a word of any Chinese tongue, was armed with only a Lonely Planet guidebook, and she and her equally clueless travel companion, Claire, had dreamed up the trip during a less-than-sober 4:00 a.m. meal at an International House of Pancakes (IHOP).

“Neither of us had ever traveled independently before or been to a country where we couldn’t speak the language,” Gilman recalls. “The farthest west I’d ever been, in fact, was Cleveland. Nonetheless, we became convinced that we should not only embark on an epic journey, but begin someplace incredibly daunting and remote, where none of our friends had ever set foot before … At that point, Communist China had been open to independent backpackers for about all of 10 minutes.”

Undress Me is a follow-up of sorts to Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress, Gilman’s best-selling memoir about growing up with eccentric parents on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in which she displayed a streak of self-deprecating, tongue-firmly-in-cheek sassiness. There’s plenty of sassiness in Undress Me too, albeit tempered with a sense of the grotesque as Gilman plunges ever deeper into the chaos and unfamiliarity of China.

She gets a nosebleed — and a dose of reality — as soon as she and Claire step off the plane in Hong Kong. “The reality of how utterly alone we were was starting to hit me; the loneliness of it was sonic,” Gilman writes. “We could disappear or die here — who would even care? It was, I realize, a Copernican moment. For perhaps the first time in my life, it became viscerally clear to me just how little I mattered, just how much I was not in fact the center of the universe. It was a swift kick to the gut.”

The book goes on to describe menacing Communist officials, life-threatening illness and disease, lack of nutrition, a language barrier as large and imposing as the Great Wall itself (“All the signs, of course, were in Chinese … It was as if a computer glitch had converted everything into dingbats, squiggles, and glyphs … It made me feel brain damaged”), and ultimately, a Heart of Darkness-type descent into madness.

Food is always a challenge: “[I]n the poor nation of one billion, the Chinese ate things we average Americans found repulsive. At the Pujiang Restaurant, ‘chicken’ consisted of feet, necks, and chopped-up spinal columns; ‘pork’ meant bone shards with strings of fat clinging to them; ‘beef’ was tendons, joints, and gristle.” As for sanitation, Gilman spares no details for those of us who’ve always wondered what it’s like to use a public squat toilet.

The better travel memoirs, though, are as much about the writer’s self-discovery as about the discovery of a place. And Gilman does “find” herself through the reflective, red-tinted gaze of China. She shows her inner resourcefulness in an encounter with Chinese officials who come to her hotel room after Claire, stricken with mental health problems, disappears into the Chinese wilderness.

“When a stranger arrives announced on your doorstep in the middle of the night accompanied by the military police, many people, I suspect, would get nervous and demand to contact their embassy,” she writes. “I am smack in the middle of a communist country known for its human rights abuses and political torture. Amazingly, in my fatigue and disorientation, I simply wave them inside like the hostess at a Tupperware party.”

There’s also a hint in the book that Gilman’s progression from frightened foreigner to resourceful heroine mirrors China’s transition from dark and gloomy authoritarian stronghold to emerging free-market competitor. When she visited the country, reform policies were improving the standard of living, especially for urban workers and farmers. In December 1986, students, taking advantage of the political thaw, protested the slow pace of reform. The backlash that came three years later in Tiananmen Square could not stop the momentum of modernization.

In an epilogue, Gilman evokes the extraordinary pace of change. One woman named Lisa, whom she meets on her 1986 backpacking adventure, was a picture of abject misery, apparently condemned to “endlessly washing dishes for her husband, serving beer to foreigners.” But 20 years later, when Gilman revisits China, the same woman “has gone from being a young waitress with a pink hair ribbon to one of Yangshuo’s preeminent entrepreneurs. Today she owns and runs two guesthouses and a restaurant, and she and some American business partners are finalizing a development deal for a four-star hotel. When President Bill Clinton came to Yangshuo in the late ’90s, Lisa was not only part of the delegation who welcomed him, but the proprietor who served him what he declared to be ‘the best coffee in Yangshuo.’”

Emma Kat Richardson

After selling millions of books worldwide, penning an Obie Award–winning play with his equally well-noted younger sister Amy, and cultivating the kind of sweater-vested, lefty politico audience that must keep the suits at National Pubic Radio (NPR) waist-deep in spicy tuna rolls, how exactly does David Sedaris manage to keep himself fresh and culturally relevant? At the top of his game, Sedaris has always been the thinking man’s humorist — the kind of literary lothario that even your grandmother has heard of (and adores, naturally). Now, with his sixth collection of witty, observational-styled essays, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Sedaris has reached a crossroads in his epic career: either grow with your core base, or fade into pop cultural obscurity.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames, along with its accompanying global book tour, can best be viewed as an ongoing case study in misfit dysfunction — a natural continuation to Sedaris’ trademark genre of wry, autobiographical narration. Whereas his previous collections have revolved primarily around the outrageous hijinks of his thoroughly unpredictable Greek family, the stories presented in Flames display a heightened sense of maturity and confident self-awareness, the sort of which that courses breathlessly through every page and every chapter. If Me Talk Pretty One Day, Sedaris’ 2000 release about moving to France with his partner and his struggle to cope with learning a foreign language while thriving in a foreign land, stood as his literary adolescent years, then Flames represents full-fledged adulthood: a coming-out party for a now-seasoned world traveler; an awkward pupil of culture now especially skilled at the unusual art of adaptation.

As its inflammatory title suggests, Flames spends more than 300 pages highlighting emotions of fear and discomfort and the many perils of frequent travel, and no one recreates the outsider experience quite as vividly as Sedaris (in classic, peak form) does. There’s a reason why he is able to affix the title “noted humorist” to his business cards, and in Flames, the humor is no less sharp or wryly observant than in prior works. The difference here is that Sedaris is writing from an interloper’s perspective more frequently than he has in the past, and his descriptions of third party discomfort play as well as the book’s more personal elements do.

An early chapter entitled “Keeping Up” finds Sedaris watching vacationing American couples arguing loudly outside of his apartment window, taking desperate stabs at figuring their way around Sedaris’ adopted home of Paris, while concurrently mangling the French language as though it were a garbage-bound piece of paper. (One woman even mistakenly believes that her meager Spanish skills will suffice for the trip.) Still another story brings Sedaris to the doorstep of his father’s neighbors in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he makes acquaintances with a flamboyant 15-year-old, whose own Southern-fried parents proudly proclaim to be a homosexual. Odd, Sedaris sniffs in his biting narrative. In his own Southern childhood, identifying oneself as gay would have been nothing short of a death sentence; you’d have to find yourself a girlfriend “who was willing to settle for the sensitive type.”

The best story in Flames, however, is the memoir’s last: a multipart epic about the author’s two-decade-long love affair with smoking cigarettes and subsequent decision to give them up for good. It’s an arduous undertaking that has Sedaris and his partner, Hugh, relocating to Japan for a three-month excursion, steeped in the fundamental principles of cultural misfit-hood. Broken up into three distinct sections — “Before,” “Japan,” and “After,” respectively — the story offers an inside man’s perspective into Sedaris at his very best and most introspective, and indeed, the entire account reads as though the passages were copied directly from the pages of his diary. “The Smoking Section” is equal parts poignant and melodramatic, altruistic and self-serving, all at once. It is here that Sedaris demonstrates his remarkable ability to spin seemingly mundane scenes into funny and interesting lifestyle pieces, with no shortage of heart. By its conclusion, one can’t help but wonder why moving to Tokyo wouldn’t be just as, if not more, effective a method for kicking butts as attaching an endless parade of nicotine patches to one’s forearm would be.

As a performer, Sedaris’ star shines equally as bright, but in a radically different manner than his comedic persona radiates when regulated to the page. Currently underway on a multicity North American book reading tour, Sedaris has taken to reading out loud from works by other authors, a few of his as-yet unpublished essays, and even a smattering of excerpts from his personal journal, offering a rare glimpse of the author when he is unfiltered by the bounds of the editing process.

It’s fun to watch Sedaris relay his unique brand of offbeat, awkward humor to the audience in person, and listening to the introductory origins of each story provides the kind of elated enhancement that is more often applied to the most cherished of fantasy fiction, but rarely to the kind of observational memoir writing of which Sedaris has repeatedly proven himself a master. Robbed of the protection of editors and literary distance, many equally capable writers would more than likely find themselves foundering onstage. In his public readings though, Sedaris demonstrates that, on paper or off, he’s able to use his biting and keen sense of humor to make pathways into his audience’s hearts; put quite simply, he’s just a funny guy.

Converting humor from the page to the stage is no easy feat, and many fine nuances are often sacrificed in translation. The fact that Sedaris has been able to consistently maintain a long-lasting relationship with his avid readers stands as an overwhelming testament to his genius and talent as both a writer and a performer. The trick to remaining relevant is to grow and mature with one’s audience — a difficulty that has seen many gifted artists forfeited in its wake. Sedaris, conversely, continues to regenerate the kind of radiant humor and spark in both his writing and his performing that has simultaneously drawn in younger readers while keeping his core base unwaveringly interested. Upon reaching the summit of Flames, one gets the sense that this isn’t Sedaris’ zenith; rather, it’s something of a new beginning.

Emma Kat Richardson