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. Ring Lardner's humor, quirky imagination, and ear for the American vernacular endeared him to such formidable critics as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, V. S. Pritchett, and Virginia Woolf. A newspaperman who began as a sports reporter and almost accidentally stumbled into short-story writing, Lardner meticulously captured the way Americans really speak. In You Know Me Al (1916), he created one of the most enduring characters in American fiction, the semi-literate baseball player Jack Keefe. Jonathan Yardley is the book critic of and a columnist for the Washington Post . His books include biographies of Ring Lardner and Frederick Exley. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism in 1981.