Stephan Pastis

Photo credit: Susan Young

A Q&A with Stephan Pastis >

About the Author

Stephan Pastis is the creator of Pearls Before Swine, an acclaimed comic strip that appears in more than six hundred newspapers and boasts a devoted following.

In 2013, Pastis was inspired to break out of the comic-strip box, penning his first children’s book, Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made, which became an instant New York Times bestseller. Mistakes Were Made was quickly followed by three other installments in the popular middle-grade series starring a brilliantly bad detective with a sidekick polar bear. Critics have praised the author for appealing to young readers with his knack for comic timing and the interplay between cartoon, text, and elements of the absurd in his storytelling.

About Timmy Failure, Stephan says, “For me as a kid, I liked to laugh. And I’m hoping these books do that for both kids and their parents. I just really want to give them stories that have something humorous in every chapter.”

“Timmy is a detective who can take any mystery and make it more mysterious.” – Stephan Pastis