A girl and her favorite stuffed animal, a bunny named Al, spend a busy, happy day together.

A child describes the special relationship shared with a cuddly red stuffed bunny.

Unwilling to wait for a boy to write to her, Al takes the reins Al has two big problems in her life, and both have to do with her mailbox—or more specifically, her empty mailbox. A few months ago, her father’s new wife promised that Al could spend the summer with them, but Al still hasn’t received a written invitation. Even worse, the cute boy she met at her father’s wedding said he would write, but Al hasn’t even gotten a short note from him. What’s a girl to do when she’s waiting to hear from a boy? For a girl like Al, it’s easy: She’ll write to him! But writing a letter to a boy turns out to be harder than she thought. She can’t let him know that she likes him, so signing the letter Your old pal, Al should do the trick, right? Now if she could only work up the courage to send the letter . . .

In 2020 angels of a high order started incarnating on Earth as humans. In early 2020 guards at Teotihuacan, an archeological site in Mexico, find eight fat handwritten notebooks on a ledge at the Palace of the Jaguars. They purport to be the journal, and maybe last testament, of an American, age 69, hiding out in the high desert of New Mexico and on the run from intelligence agencies. He sums up his life spent with a most unusual colleague named Blaise. The journal entries span seven months in 2019 then end as 2020 begins, but they cover the history of the Earth. Offered in a matter-of-fact manner, the writers revelations grow increasingly alarming and hard to credit. Wormholes on the Earth. Pleiadian influence in human evolution. Hyperdimensional Light grids. Clairvoyant scientists. Shapeshifting Ascended Masters. Accounts of planetwide psychic access. An apparitional theater of mythic figures. Angels 60 billion years old on the verge of human incarnation. Yet the journals, written with warmth, fondness, and amusement, read like the memoir of truly one mans best friend, Blaiseyet this Blaise is too big, too old, too vast to be a human. What then? And who wrote the journals? He seems untraceable. In 2023 the notebooks passed to Dartmouth College professor Frederick Graham Atkinson, Ph.D., who, starting in 2025, prepared them for publication, adding helpful editorial notes. The journals, though never intended for publication by their author and its a miracle they survived the desert and years in a dusty unused office, Dr. Atkinson states, offer an unusual, often inspiring, and mostly astonishing report of the inner affairs of planet, culture, myth, humanity, the spiritual world, and where its all heading.

This collection brings together twenty-one of Lardner’s best pieces, including the six Jack Keefe stories that comprise You Know Me, Al, as well as such familiar favorites as “Alibi Ike,” “Some Like Them Cold,” and “Guillible’s Travels.” For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.