'Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk' by David Sedaris - Book Review

David Sedaris is the best-selling humor author of brilliant personal essays and memoirs like Me Talk Pretty One Day. His newest book, though, is a collection of short fables about the animal world. Or rather, about an animal world that is much like our human world--cocktail parties, social relationships and inter-species awkwardness abound. Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk is totally unusual and certainly worth a read.

David Sedaris is arguably the funniest humor writer today, but he's best known for personal memoirs such as Me Talk Pretty One Day. His latest book, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, takes a decidedly different approach. Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk is a collection of brief stories about animals, sort of a comedy-of-manners approach to an animal kingdom where cocktail parties and dating coexist with hunting for prey or being slaughtered for a Christmas dinner. It may sound hard to believe, but in Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, Sedaris combines traditional animal fables with astute and witty modern social observations.

While it would normally be a bit of a tough sell to recommend that someone read a set of short stories about animals, the fact that the author of Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk is David Sedaris will be enough to persuade many readers to give the book a shot. And they won't be disappointed.