This book brings together nine of my papers on the topic of asking and telling. Each paper analyzes complexities that are involved when people ask or tell something to other people. For each of the nine papers, I wrote a short lead-in that precedes the paper and a commentary that follows it. The italicized lead-in identifies the research interests that drove the analysis. The commentary provides my current sense of the paper, including when relevant, a critique of it. As I had conducted some of the research, including the work on preference organization, nearly fifty years ago, I have had ample time to reflect on these papers. In the remainder of the introduction, I briefly describe the atmosphere during the early years of Conversation Analysis (CA), my approach to the field, themes that occur across several of the papers, the order of the papers, and the central points of each paper"