“When I started writing books for children, I knew what interested me,” Daniel Handler writes early on in his new memoir And Then? And Then? What Else?. “Terrible things happening, like in all the best literature.” Now there’s a man who understands his own muse. Writing as Lemony Snicket, in A Series of Unfortunate Events, Handler has been true to that muse. He piled terrible thing on terrible thing with an insouciant sweetness and lugubrious humour little rivalled in con...| UnHerd
The required summer reading for rising ninth graders at my son’s public high school in Brooklyn this year is a choice of the following: Unwind, a work of dystopian science-fiction by bestselling young-adult author Neal Shusterman; The Epic Crush of Genie Lo, a fantasy YA novel by F.C. Yee; and Punching the Air, a National Book Award finalist novel in verse, also YA, co-written by Ibi Zoboi, a Haitian-American author, and Yusef Salaam, a New York City councilman and one of the “Central P...| UnHerd