WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES.

David Sedaris. Hachette Audio.

8 CDs, unabridged. $34.98.

You don't have to listen to David Sedaris read his work aloud to enjoy it. The audiobook of his latest collection of essays is not mandatory; if, for some reason, you are violently opposed to being read to, get a hard copy of When You Are Engulfed in Flames (Little, Brown, $25.99).

But having your inner voice do the work can't match the supreme pleasure of hearing the hilariously deadpan author describe a well-dressed, sixtysomething couple's unleashing of a shocking torrent of profanity (''It was as if they'd kidnapped the grandparents from a Ralph Lauren ad and forced them into a David Mamet play'') or the antics of the vile guinea worm that had attacked his boyfriend's mom (``If I was a child and saw something creeping out of a hole in my mother's leg, I would march to the nearest orphanage and put myself up for adoption. I would burn all pictures of her, destroy anything she had ever given me, and start all over because that is simply disgusting'').

Fans will recognize many of these essays -- most have been previously published in GQ, Esquire and other magazines -- but the measure of Sedaris' reading skill is how funny his stories are, even when you know where they're going. Abject humiliation is a recurring theme, whether Sedaris has accidentally expelled a cough drop into the lap of a cranky seatmate on a flight to Raleigh (Solution to Saturday's Puzzle) or is stuck in a Paris doctor's office with no pants on (In the Waiting Room): ``It's funny the things that run through your mind when you're sitting in your underpants in front of a pair of strangers. Suicide comes up, but just as you embrace it as a viable option you remember that you don't have the proper tools.''

Both essays appeared in The New Yorker, but they're even more hilarious here and benefit hugely from the author's alternately bitchy and mortified tone.

Sedaris has been reading aloud for quite awhile now, and, really, does anyone do it better? His timing is impeccable, his ear for inflection as sharp as that of any stand-up comic. Self-deprecation, a borderline morbid curiosity and a dash of whine helped make his name on National Public Radio with essays about his job as a Macy's elf (Santaland Diaries), and he went on to write and record more essays in Barrel Fever, Naked, Holidays on Ice, Me Talk Pretty One Day and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames -- the title comes from a booklet he found in a hotel room in Hiroshima, Japan -- retraces some of his favorite material: growing up gay in Raleigh; his long-suffering (at least the way Sedaris tells it) boyfriend Hugh Hamrick; his hopeless inability to learn a foreign language (this time, Japanese).

Sedaris' family, of course, plays a starring role. In The Understudy, he recalls the formidable Mrs. Peacock, who babysat the Sedaris kids for a week in 1967. ''She had this attitude, not that she was better than us but that she was as good as us -- and that simply was not true.'' Sister Amy and an ancient bestiality magazine provide a marvelous payoff to Town and Country, one of four essays recorded live. Digression is lively and ever-present: Road Trips opens with Sedaris' contemplation of the neighborhood in which he grew up, leads to his meeting with a proudly out gay teenager (''I felt like someone in a ten-pound leg brace meeting a beneficiary of the new polio vaccine'') and winds around to his own coming-out declaration, forced under what might be termed extreme duress.

There are those, of course, who would take Sedaris to task for inventing and embellishing his past, but verisimilitude is irrelevant. This is comedy, pure and simple, with occasional moments of surprising sweetness, usually coming as the unsentimental Sedaris briefly reveals his affection for Hugh. In Keeping Up, a relationship snapshot disguised as an account of a trip to the zoo, he recounts a snit, then admits his inability to function without his better half. In Old Faithful, a dutiful Hugh tackles a disgusting boil on his boyfriend's tailbone. ''We're an aging monogamous couple,'' Sedaris tells him, ''and this is all part of the bargain.'' This idea ``kept Hugh awake that night, and still does.''

The book's last segment chronicles Sedaris' decision to move to Japan for three months to quit smoking. He fails miserably at trying to learn the language -- The Smoking Section is strongly reminiscent of Me Talk Pretty One Day -- but shockingly, this lifelong smoker walks away from cigarettes cold turkey.

''The way I see it,'' Sedaris writes, ''my lungs are like sweatshirts in a detergent commercial, the before and after so fundamentally different that they constitute a miracle. . . . I'm middle-aged, and for the first time in thirty years, I feel invincible.'' Fans, who simply can't get enough of his wry wit, have to hope that he's right.

Connie Ogle is The Miami Herald's book editor.

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