[vidarh]

Clifford D. Simak's "City" (1952) consists of a series of bridges between a number of short stories described as legends of "Man" tolds by intelligent dogs to their puppies. The dogs in the stories were able to start communicating with humans thanks to the work of one of the human protagonists, getting intelligent enough to form a civiliation of their own once humans gradually disappear.

It's one of the weirdest apocalyptic sci-fi novels around, in that it describes the end of the human race by isolation and loneliness and resulting escape into an alien world, while at the same time describing dogs creating a thriving replacement.