Daniel Handler is the
author of the literary novels The
Basic Eight, Watch
Your Mouth, and, most recently, Adverbs
. Under the name Lemony Snicket he has also written a sequence
of books for children, known collectively as A Series of
Unfortunate Events, which have sold more than 53 million
copies and were the basis of a film starring Jim Carrey. His
intricate and witty writing style has won him numerous fans
for his critically acclaimed literary work and his wildly successful
children's books.
Born and raised in San
Francisco, Handler attended Wesleyan University and returned
to his hometown after graduating. He co-founded the magazine
American Chickens! with illustrator Lisa Brown (with
whom he soon became smitten), and they moved to New York City,
where Handler eventually sold his first novel after working
as a book and film critic for several newspapers. He continued
to write, and he and his wife returned to San Francisco, where
they now live with their son Otto.
Handler has worked
intermittently in film and music, most recently in collaboration
with composer Nathaniel Stookey on a piece commissioned by the
San Francisco Symphony, entitled The
Composer Is Dead, which has been performed all over the
world world and is now a book with CD. An adjunct accordionist
for the music group The Magnetic Fields, he is also the author
of Lemony
Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography, The
Beatrice Letters, Horseradish:
Bitter Truths You Can’t Avoid, , and two books for
Christmas: The
Lump of Coal and The
Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming: a Christmas story.
He is the screenwriter of
the film Rick, a revamp of the Verdi opera Rigoletto,
and the film adaptation of Joel Rose's novel Kill the Poor,
and has written forThe
New York Times, Newsday, San Francisco Chronicle,
The Believer, Chickfactor, and various anthologies,
and was the chair of the Judging Panel for the National Book
Awards in Young People’s Literature, 2008. His current
projects include a fourth novel for adults, a picture book in
collaboration with Maira Kalman and the script for the long-awaited
second Snicket movie.
•••
“Daniel Handler
[is] something like an American Nabokov.”
— Dave Eggers
“One
of our most dazzling literary conjurers shuffles the deck of
contemporary consciousness and desire.”
— Michael Chabon
“Sentence
by sentence, Handler dazzles, teases the unwary with unforeseeable
perceptions. ”
