Daniel Handler

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Image:Daniel Handler.jpg Daniel Handler (born February 28, 1970 in San Francisco), also professionally known as Lemony Snicket, is an American author, screenwriter, and accordionist. A native San Franciscan, alumnus of the San Francisco Boys Chorus, and graduate of Lowell High School, he graduated from Wesleyan University in 1992.

His novels are The Basic Eight, Watch Your Mouth and Adverbs; the former two are comedies with a Gothic mood and rather adult subject matter, while Adverbs comprises sixteen short stories about love, each entitled with an adverb. His screenplays were produced as the 2003 films Rick (based on the Verdi opera Rigoletto) and Kill the Poor (based on the novel by Joel Rose). His accordion playing can be heard most notably on The Magnetic Fields' album, 69 Love Songs. He lives in a 1907 Victorian house on a steep hill in San Francisco. He is married to Lisa Brown, a graphic artist he met at university.

Handler originally came up with "Lemony Snicket" as a pseudonym to use rather than placing his real name on the mailing lists of several right-wing organizations he was researching for one of his novels. It became something of an in-joke with his friends, who were known to order pizzas under the name. As "Lemony Snicket", Handler has written a series of children's novels, A Series of Unfortunate Events, but the man who starts out as a narrator becomes a character in the series, even writing a book entitled Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography. He has also written two additional works as Snicket, a comic about a Yeti in It Was a Dark and Silly Night, a volume of Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly's Little Lit series, and a holiday short story entitled "The Lump of Coal". He was featured in "Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs..." in which he did an introduction and a half completed story where he urged readers to complete it.

Currently there are 12 published books in the A Series of Unfortunate Events series, along with the "autobiography." The first three books are the basis of the 2004 film Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events.

A commentary track entitled "Brad Silberling and the real Lemony Snicket Commentary" was recorded for the DVD released on 26 April 2005, employing Handler as the voice of Snicket. Brad Silberling is the movie's director, and the "real Lemony Snicket" joke is a jibe aimed at Jude Law, considered the "Impostor Lemony Snicket". It is more or less a one joke feature: Silberling taunts "Snicket" that the movie is about to end, and then another scene begins and the latter feigns shock and disappointment. During one of the later scenes of the film, Snicket is so upset by the events on screen that he plays an accordion and sings about leeches rather than watch what happens.

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