Daniel Handler

Daniel Handler is the author of the novels The Basic Eight, Watch Your Mouth, Adverbs, and, with Maira Kalman, Why We Broke Up.  As Lemony Snicket, he has written the best-selling series All The Wrong Questions as well as A Series of Unfortunate Events which was the basis of a feature film starring Jim Carrey and Meryl Streep, with Jude Law as Lemony Snicket. Netflix has produced an original series based on A Series of Unfortunate Events which premiered January 2017.Handler’s newest novel, All The Dirty Parts, looks honestly at the erotic impulses of an all-too-typical young man. Cole is a boy in high school. He runs cross country, he sketches, he jokes around with friends. But none of this quite matters next to the allure of sex. “Let me put it this way,” he says. “Draw a number line, with zero is you never think about sex and ten is, it’s all you think about, and while you are drawing the line, I am thinking about sex.”All The Dirty Parts is an unblinking take on teenage desire in a culture of unrelenting explicitness and shunted communication, where sex feels like love, but no one knows what love feels like. With short chapters in the style of Jenny Offill or Mary Robison, Daniel Handler gives us a tender, brutal, funny, intoxicating portrait of an age when the lens of sex tilts the world. “There are love stories galore,” Cole tells us, “This isn’t that. The story I’m typing is all the dirty parts.”