A best-selling author tells kids everything they ever wanted to know about him--and Goosebumps! What was R.L. Stine like as a kid? How did he start writing books? Where does he get all his scary ideas? These and many more questions are answered in this humorous, fast-paced biography. Photos, line drawings.

James Baldwin was beginning to be recognized as the most brilliant black writer of his generation when his first book of essays, Notes of a Native Son , established his reputation in 1955. No one was more pleased by the book’s reception than Baldwin’s high school friend Sol Stein. A rising New York editor, novelist, and playwright, Stein had suggested that Baldwin do the book and coaxed his old friend through the long and sometimes agonizing process of putting the volume together and seeing it into print. Now, in this fascinating new book, Sol Stein documents the story of his intense creative partnership with Baldwin through newly uncovered letters, photos, inscriptions, and an illuminating memoir of the friendship that resulted in one of the classics of American literature. Included in this book are the two works they created together–the story “Dark Runner” and the play Equal in Paris , both published here for the first time. Though a world of difference separated them–Baldwin was black and gay, living in self-imposed exile in Europe; Stein was Jewish and married, with a growing family to support–the two men shared the same fundamental passion. Nothing mattered more to either of them than telling and writing the truth, which was not always welcome. As Stein wrote Baldwin in a long, heartfelt letter, “You are the only friend with whom I feel comfortable about all three: heart, head, and writing.” In this extraordinary book, Stein unfolds how that shared passion played out in the months surrounding the creation and publication of Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son , in which Baldwin’s main themes are illuminated. A literary event published to honor the eightieth anniversary of James Baldwin’s birth, Native Sons is a celebration of one of the most fruitful and influential friendships in American letters.

In this open letter to his father – a letter which was never sent – Kafka tries to come to terms with one of the most deeply rooted obsessions of his troubled soul. Written as a long, tense and dramatic confession in which writer and man are gathered together in front of an ambivalent figure of authority, Dearest Father is a desperate attempt to retrace the origins of a turbulent relationship between an unflinching parent and an extremely sensitive child. Both a merciless indictment of his father and an impassioned appeal to him, Kafka's inspired work is one of the most lucid and touching psychological documents in twentieth-century literature. This volume also includes passages from Kafka's diaries and correspondence.