Featured Author Talk
Daniel Handler in Conversation
Bestselling Author, Screenwriter, Playwright, and Musician Daniel Handler in conversation with Chanan Tigay
Keynote
Jewish Arts and Bookfest
Sunday, May 4, 2025
at UC Berkeley’s Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA
Join Daniel Handler, the creative force behind the Lemony Snicket series, for a conversation with Chanan Tigay about his latest book, And Then? And Then? What Else? In his memoir, Handler combines elements of autobiography, literary analysis, and storytelling to reflect on his journey growing up in San Francisco to navigating the ups and downs of a literary career, all while guided by the literature, music, and culture he loves.
Photo by Meredith Heuer.
About the Book: And Then? And Then? What Else?
You never love a book the way you love a book when you are ten.
Writing as Lemony Snicket, Daniel Handler has led several generations of young readers into that special and curious space of being hopelessly lost, and joyfully finding yourself, in the essential strangeness of literature. The wondrous and perilous journey of the Baudelaire orphans sprung from the author’s own path, from his childhood discovery of Baudelaire’s poetry through the countless peculiarities of his pursuit of a literary life—abject failure and startling success, breakthrough and breakdown, concordance and controversy—lit along the way by the books and culture he loved best.
At once a personal memoir and a literary exploration, a how-to book and a critical inquiry, a sequence of stories and a series of events, And Then? And Then? What Else? is a book not just for anyone curious about the creator of Lemony Snicket, but for anyone who loved books when they were a child, and still loves them now.
About Daniel Handler
Daniel Handler is the author of seven novels, including Why We Broke Up, We Are Pirates, All The Dirty Parts and Bottle Grove. His new book on writing And Then? And Then? What Else? has been published by Liverlight/W.W. Norton in 2024.
As Lemony Snicket, he is responsible for numerous books for children, including the thirteen-volume A Series of Unfortunate Events, the four-volume All the Wrong Questions, and The Dark, which won the Charlotte Zolotow Award.
Mr. Snicket’s first book for readers of all ages, Poison for Breakfast, was published by Liveright/W.W. Norton in 2021.
Handler has received commissions from the San Francisco Symphony, Berkeley Repertory Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and has collaborated with artist Maira Kalman on a series of books for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and with musicians Stephin Merritt (of the Magnetic Fields), Benjamin Gibbard (of Death Cab for Cutie), Colin Meloy (of the Decemberists) and Torquil Campbell (of Stars).
His books have sold more than 70 million copies and have been translated into 40 languages, and have been adapted for film, stage and television, including the recent adaptation of A Series of Unfortunate Events for which he was awarded both the Peabody and the Writers Guild of America awards.
He lives in San Francisco with the illustrator Lisa Brown, to whom he is married and with whom he has collaborated on several books and one son.
About Chanan Tigay
Chanan Tigay is an award-winning writer and journalist who has covered the Middle East, 9/11, and the United Nations for numerous magazines, newspapers, and wires. Author of The Lost Book of Moses: the Hunt for the World’s Oldest Bible (Ecco/HarperCollins), Tigay recently was featured talent in the two-hour History Channel special “The God Code.” Born in Jerusalem, Tigay holds degrees from Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania, was an Investigative Reporting Fellow at U.C. Berkeley and is a professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. He is currently spending the year at Harvard University as a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.