About this item
In this sneaky, silly picture book for fans of Oliver Jeffers and Jon Klassen, an intrepid - but not so clever - space explorer is certain he's found the only living thing on Mars A young astronaut is absolutely sure there is life to be found on Mars. He sets off on a solitary mission, determined to prove the naysayers wrong. But when he arrives, equipped with a package of cupcakes as a gift, he sees nothing but a nearly barren planet. Finally, he spies a single flower and packs it away to take back to Earth as proof that there is indeed life on Mars. But as he settles in for the journey home, he cracks open his cupcakes - only to discover that someone has eaten them all! Readers will love being in on the secret: Unbeknownst to the explorer, a Martian has been wandering through the illustrations the whole time - and he got himself a delicious snack along the way.
About the Author
I grew up in Nyack, New York, just up the street from the Hudson River. In our house, there was always an art project going on. My early drawings were very animated: a lot of stuff zipping around, airplanes, racing cars, football players. No surprise my first published drawing was a pack of rats running along a highway (The Rat Race) . I did that for the Op Ed page when I was still in high school. I went to college at The Cooper Union School of Art in New York City. I studied painting, sculpture and filmmaking, but what I loved doing most - in my spare time - was drawing cartoons and comic strips. When I graduated, I hauled my pile of doodles into the offices of a bunch of editors, with the wild notion that somebody might publish them. When that failed, I wrote a story for kids to go with my pictures () . It was two sentences long (which counts, by the way) . Frances Foster, a wonderful editor at Random House, saw something in that book and signed me up. The next book, , was about a dog who teaches economics at a university. When he gets home, he throws off his clothes and acts like a dog, which is fine, until some fellow teachers discover this and he loses his job. Somebody told me that was a story about "being yourself. " I never realized it had a moral. I moved to another publisher with , the story of a grumpy guy who laughs in his sleep. This book was doing very poorly until the comedienne Phyliss Diller read it on PBS's . It stayed in print for over twenty years. My fourth book, , was a hit. One of the first people to see it and give it the thumb's up - literally, hot off the press - was Maurice Sendak. We bumped into each other at the printers. It was a lucky first meeting, and happily not our last.That was all a long time ago. Since then I've written many other picture books, illustrated a few by other authors, and created a series of offbeat wordplay books, beginning with the book of palindromes, I visit schools across the country and sometimes around the globe. I live with my wife, Audrey, in San Francisco.
