How did Jon Scieszka get so funny? He grew up as one of six brothers with Catholic school, lots of comic books, lazy summers at the lake with time to kill, babysitting misadventures, TV shows, and jokes told at family dinner.

After a car crash, writer Paul Sheldon is saved by his number one fan. She brings him home, splints his mangled legs, and all he has to do in return is write a very special book, one all about her favourite character. Because if he doesn't, if he is bad, she will be cross-- very cross.

The author offers a meditation on mortality as he chronicles his own life and that of his family from cradle to grave, integrating biological details with cultural history and criticism to furnish a portrait of human existence as revealed through a single family.

"The life of a good dog is like the life of a good person, only shorter and more compressed." So writes Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anna Quindlen about her beloved black Labrador retriever, Beau. With her trademark wisdom and humor, Quindlen reflects on how her life has unfolded in tandem with Beau's, and on the lessons she's learned by watching him: to roll with the punches, to take things as they come, to measure herself not in terms of the past...

Author Walter Dean Myers describes his childhood in Harlem in the 1940s and 1950s, discussing his loving stepmother, his problems in school, his reasons for leaving home, and his beginnings as a writer.