On Animals (Lead)

National Best Seller“Magnificent.” (The New York Times)“Beguiling observant and howlingly funny.” (San Francisco Chronicle)“Spectacular.” (Star Tribune Minneapolis)“Full of astonishments.” (The Boston Globe)Susan Orlean - the beloved New Yorker staff writer hailed as “a national treasure” by The Washington Post and the author of the New York Times best seller The Library Book - gathers a lifetime of musings meditations and in-depth profiles about animals.“How we interact with animals has preoccupied philosophers poets and naturalists for ages” writes Susan Orlean. Since the age of six when Orlean wrote and illustrated a book called Herbert the Near-Sighted Pigeon she’s been drawn to stories about how we live with animals and how they abide by us. Now in On Animals she examines animal-human relationships through the compelling tales she has written over the course of her celebrated career.These stories consider a range of creatures - the household pets we dote on the animals we raise to end up as meat on our plates the creatures who could eat us for dinner the various tamed and untamed animals we share our planet with who are central to human life. In her own backyard Orlean discovers the delights of keeping chickens. In a different backyard in New Jersey she meets a woman who has 23 pet tigers - something none of her neighbors knew about until one of the tigers escapes. In Iceland the world’s most famous whale resists the efforts to set him free; in Morocco the world’s hardest-working donkeys find respite at a special clinic. We meet a show dog and a lost dog and a pigeon who knows exactly how to get home. Equal parts delightful and profound enriched by Orlean’s stylish prose and precise research these stories celebrate the meaningful cross-species connections that grace our collective existence.