Sun. May 6 

David Sedaris is the most charming and disarming of writers and speakers. He’s got a soft Southern accent and a certain gentility about him, but every now and then something mean, nasty and hilarious breaks through. It’s there in his books and maybe even more so when he reads from them. He’ll be doing that at Symphony Hall Sunday May 8 in his hour-long reading, part of the Celebrity Series. 
   We’re guessing he’ll have something new, but also feature his collection of stories, “Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk,” which looks suspiciously like a children’s book. The warm and chummy jacket cover by Ian Falconer, of the “Olivia” children’s book series, suggests as much.
   So perhaps you’d thinking that Sedaris - this witty, deft observer of the human condition - has shifted course. “Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk,” a collection of 16 short pieces written over the past seven years, ostensibly concerns the animal kingdom. There are multiple species, wild and domestic.
   But “Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk” – which bears the subtitle “A Modern Bestiary” - is about animals the way George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” was about animals. That is, you’ll spot a lot of human traits among these barkers, quackers, mooers and mewers. They’re a self-centered, vain, prejudiced bunch, concerned mostly with their next meal – blithely unaware they may be someone else’s.
    There’s an imprisoned cat carping his way through an AA program. A rabbit that gnaws the horn off a unicorn. A hippo with a really bad parasite problem in her hindquarters. Falconer’s illustrations, too, get a bit nasty. “Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk” is a charmingly subversive and funny book.
    We spoke with Sedaris, 54, from his New York hotel last year. (A version of this piece ran in the Boston Herald last year.)

   JSInk: Why animals and not people this time?
   Sedaris: I suppose I could have made them people, but then I think there was something good about stepping back a bit. If they were people, very quickly you’d say, “That’s me. Or my sister-in-law.” But because they are animals it might take you a bit longer to realize that they were you or your sister-in-law. And those dogs in “The Faithful Setter” couldn’t be people, because people can leave the house whenever they want to. Dogs can’t. They’re at the mercy of their master.
   That setter spends his day performing stud service and then he and his owner happen upon a house afire, where he chats with a rescued dachshund, but smells a child burning inside. And it makes him hungry.
    I talked to somebody who said, “All the animals in your book are so horrible except for that setter.” I said, “I think he’s the worst one of all!” People would think their dog would be as sentimental as they are. But I spent a week at the morgue and burning flesh smells like barbecue and it would make a dog hungry. A dog would not think, “Oh, a poor human perished in a fire.”
    What was your initial inspiration for these stories?
    I started the book because someone gave me a collection of African folk tales on CD and they were just really bad. I thought, “I can do better than this.”
  You’re very comfortable around these critters.
  Actually, a lot of this book has to do with the amount of time I spend in the country in Normandy with [my boyfriend] Hugh. You’ll have a village and then there will be a couple of miles and then another village of 12 houses. There’s a lot of livestock and a lot of wild animals and because I take long walks every day and I ride my bike, I see a lot of dead animals. I spend a lot of time observing crows and cows and sheep and centipedes who attack worms or bees that attack moths. And our neighbor across the road is a sheep farmer and he had told me you always want your lambs to be born in the lambing shed because if they’re born in the field crows will come and pluck out an eye. So, I put that in a story.
  These animals sometimes pretend to play nice, but they’re not really nice.
  I suppose they’re human qualities I admire in a way. I’d much rather hear an unapologetically selfish person carry on and on about themselves than hear a polite person. I like that combination of being impassioned and being wrong, this combination of confidence and wrong-headedness. Maybe because I have so little confidence, I admire people who have it.
    Somewhere along the way, I thought this book might be a dark twist on Aesop’s Fables.
    I think too often in fables there’s one character who’s golden and another character who’s evil. What’s the pleasure in that? I think most of us are just gray. I stopped thinking of these stories as fables because fables have morals and I don’t always. There are no new sins. There are new tools with which to commit them.
   You used to take “tips” at readings. Still do that?
   No. You know what happened? The way you make your money is you go to the back of the line 15 minutes before you start and say, “I’ll sign your book right now for five dollars.” If people have a choice between waiting five hours or paying five dollars, you pay five dollars. When I was in Dallas, there was this guy walking into the store who said, “You’re charging people to sign your book?” and I just didn’t have time to explain ‘cause it was my moneymaking time so I said, “Talk to the person next to you.” So then it got out I was charging people to sign books, but I wasn’t.
   Right. You were just taking in a little extra for better service.
   I seem to have many moments like that in my life where if you look at it from one angle it’s a beautiful maid brushing her hair in front of a mirror and you look at it from another angle it’s a horrible screaming skull. At certain moments I said, “This makes perfect sense, it’s all right to do it, and it’s funny.” Then, other moments, when I took all the savings of an 11-year-old boy, I thought, “Maybe not.”
    You took an 11-year-old boy’s savings?
    He had $3.20 and I took it off him.

Starts at 7, limited tickets remain.

301 Massachusetts Ave., 617-482-6661www.celebrityseries.org