Daniel Handler is the author of five novels, including Why We Broke Up (Little, Brown), which won a Michael L. Printz Honor for literary excellence in young adult literature. His most recent novel is We Are Pirates (Bloomsbury), released in paperback February 11, 2016. As Lemony Snicket, he is the author of far too many books, supposedly for children, including A Series of Unfortunate Events and All the Wrong Questions. Handler lives in San Francisco with his wife, illustrator Lisa Brown, and their son.
On your nightstand now:
I always have one book I'm reading, one book of poetry and one book I'm reading slowly to savor. This week it's James Baldwin's The Last Interview, Tomaž Šalamun's The Four Questions of Melancholy and Carole Maso's Ava, respectively.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Dino Buzzati's The Bears' Famous Invasion of Sicily and Zilpha Keatley Snyder's The Headless Cupid or anything else full of mystery and secrets.
Your top five authors:
Haruki Murakami, Jose Saramago, Mary Robison, Joy Williams and William Maxwell--but don't tell Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov, Rachel Ingalls, Raymond Chandler and P.G. Wodehouse.
Book you've faked reading:
Various books by friends.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Tom Drury's The Black Brook, a wise and hilarious and melancholy book which is overlooked even by fans of Tom Drury. I press it into the hands of strangers.
Book you've bought for the cover:
All the marvelous Dalkey Archive Press titles with spiffy Danielle Dutton-designed covers.
Book you hid from your parents:
Anaïs Nin's Delta of Venus, which gave me vastly unrealistic expectations--not of sex, thank goodness, but about being broke.
Book that changed your life:
My high school English teacher pressed Elizabeth Bishop's Geography III into my hands, and I've been drunk on poetry ever since.
Favorite line from a book:
I hated childhood
I hate adulthood
And I love being alive.
--Mary Ruefle, "Provenance"
Five books you'll never part with:
Rachel Ingalls, Mrs. Caliban
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
William Maxwell, Time Will Darken It
Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Horacio Castellanos Moya, Dance with Snakes
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Chris Adrian's The Children's Hospital. An enormous book full of incident and heart. I wish I could fall on my head and forget it so I could read it again without knowing what will happen.
