“I'm bad at meeting people,” says David Sedaris, talking by telephone from his hotel room in Kansas City. The claim is just a little suspect, coming from a guy who will sign books for as long as it takes to embellish everyone's copies.

And sign he will, in 30 cities before the U.S portion of his tour ends Tuesday in Tucson, Ariz. (Then comes a Brazilian book festival and a Canadian tour.) His new book, "When You Are Engulfed in Flames," was released earlier this month and that means his devoted readers — he's sold millions of books in 25 languages — will be lining up patiently at signings.

His lecture tours are generally separate, though he's doing three along the way this time. Patience is required at a Sedaris signing. In Kansas City, he talked for about an hour and signed for eight-and-a-half. That was his longest day yet, at least for this tour.

Some popular writers would surely become jaded in the process, or might give up signings altogether. When is the last time you remember Stephen King appearing in so many cities? But not Sedaris.

"It's almost pathetic how much I like the book tours," he says. In conversation, he sounds simply like a lower-key version of the Sedaris in the stories.

"I was just in Omaha and saw things I had never seen before, like motorcycle pants made of fiberglass and a black arm sling that advertised the name of the doctor."

For readers of his essays and tales, absurd, sometimes morbid and often witty observations like these won't sound curious at all.

This new collection, his sixth, is full of quintessential Sedaris. There's "The Understudy," featuring the indelible sitter Mrs. Peacock, who subjects the Sedaris children to hours of labor — they take shifts scratching her back — while their parents are on a weeklong vacation.

"Adult Figures Charging Toward Toadstool" describes his childhood attempt to become an art connoisseur and his parents' misguided adventures in art acquisitions.

"Before they started collecting art," he writes, "my parents bought some pretty great things, the best being a concrete lawn ornament they picked up in the early 1960s." As far as he was concerned, inspired kitsch trumped mediocre or bad art.

Sedaris collects a little, even though he says, "I don't have good taste."

Hugh Hamrick, his longtime boyfriend (Sedaris disdains the terms partner or companion), is an artist: He's a painter as well as a set designer.

"I got Hugh to give me a painting for Christmas. It's a 17th-century Northern European picture of devils tormenting souls in hell.

"But I don't really like to go to museums, because I just keep thinking I want that and I want that. I can't see beyond my own greed."

ELFIN ROOTS

Sedaris, now 51, became virtually an overnight phenomenon with his reading of "The SantaLand Diaries" on NPR's "Morning Edition" in 1992. (It was adapted for the stage by Joe Mantello and since then has become a staple for high school, college and regional theaters.)

The subject, life as a hired elf in Macy's SantaLand in New York, was a perfect vehicle for his mordant and hilarious take on the absurdities of human behavior. His continuing popularity has hinged on his inexhaustible ability to find perfect vehicles for his observations about childhood, life with Hugh and everything else.

The title of the new book derives from some months he and Hugh spent in Japan, when he stopped smoking ("The Smoking Section"). Sedaris discovered the phrase in a little hotel booklet about safety procedures and it seems as if it was destined to become a book title.

He's been a nonsmoker now for a year and half, he proudly says. And the entire struggle to quit is made more poignant by his readers' knowledge that the author's heavy smoking mom, a frequent presence in his stories, died of lung cancer. "The Smoking Section" somehow manages to be funny, too, as you might expect; the pages on what brands of cigarettes say about the personalities of smokers are a brilliant display of informal sociology.

On the book's cover, there's a pretty obscure Van Gogh painting — and a fitting one too. It pictures a skull with a cigarette clenched between its teeth.

Sedaris remembered it from a trip to the Van Gogh Museum and knew he wanted to use it for the book jacket. But the publisher had reservations.

"They thought it looked too much like a joint. But, of course, that's what cigarettes looked like then."

CAREER CHANGE

Sedaris himself wanted to be an artist before he became a writer.

"I had a little career as an artist," Sedaris says, "and I mean little. I was in biennial at the Raleigh Museum of Art and had one show when I was 25 or 26."

And it was that "little career" that got him to Chicago in the mid-1980s, where Ira Glass, creator of the NPR show "This American Life," discovered Sedaris reading in a club, introduced him on a local show, and then brought "SantaLand Diaries" to "Morning Edition."

It was seeing a show of the Chicago Imagists — painters like Roger Brown and Jim Nutt — that brought him there. "I thought the work was thrilling," he recalls.

Sedaris was accepted to the Art Institute of Chicago. But he quickly realized he wasn't cut out for the life of a student painter. (He did finish, graduating with a BFA in 1987.)

"Nobody had prepared me for the tedium of a critique. I felt as if there was nothing to be said about my paintings."

So, to avoid talking about them, he would write something and read it aloud when it came time for his critique. The stratagem worked.

Fellow students who heard his writings (or heard about them) started asking him to read at loft parties. This led him to read in a small club every Wednesday — a training ground for a writer so attuned to the spoken story.

"I learned a lot by listening to other people. I also learned that you should never let people know how many papers you have in your hand. If they think you have too many, it makes them believe your story will be too long."

Sedaris' stories are, in fact, models of economic storytelling, even when, as in "The Smoking Section," the selection is 80 pages long. Perhaps that's because his revision process is based in part on the reaction he gets to new pieces in his "lectures."

"I read, rewrite it, read it, and rewrite it some more. I do like to see what gets the biggest laughs."

He doesn't believe he can explain why one moment or incident produces a story and another doesn't.

"Sometimes life just feels like a story," he says. "It was the day after Christmas in Paris and Hugh and I were out walking. People were in their new clothes. Somebody was wearing a coat that looked too warm for the weather and someone else was hobbling around in new shoes. It just felt very storylike."

Paris is only one of three places where they have a residence. The others are Normandy and London. All of them, as Sedaris devotees know, make their way into recent stories.

Asked whether he misses life in the U.S., he answers: "Forty years was enough for me."

Still, it's clear he loves to visit.

Sedaris likes to draw when signing books when the mood strikes him. Some of his favorites on this tour: owls, Abe Lincoln and people vomiting (including himself).

"Sometimes, I add a cartoon bubble," he says. "When one of them wants to speak."

To find out more about Robert Pincus and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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