Part memoir, part inspiration for aspiring writers, And Then? And Then? What Else? traces Daniel Handler's sometimes challenging and often amusing path toward one of the most spectacularly successful writing careers of the twenty-first century. Declaring his love of strange literature, Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil in particular, Handler reflects on the life experiences--some of them deeply personal and revealed for the first time--and the cultural influences that shaped his writing, both under his own name and as Lemony Snicket, the lonely, beleaguered, somehow both cynical and romantic narrator of the beloved thirteen-volume saga of three unlucky orphans that became one of the best-selling series of all time. Inspiring, revelatory, and entertaining, And Then? And Then? What Else? is destined to become a classic of its genre, every bit as influential as Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings or Stephen King's On Writing have been on previous generations.

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.