Daniel Handler

Daniel Handler’s most recent books are Watch Your Mouth (Harper Perennial, $13) and, as Lemony Snicket, Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography (Harper Collins Juvenile Books, $12). Here he chooses his “favorite full-sentence-titled works of fiction.”

Oh, What a Paradise It Seems by John Cheever (out of print). The word “novella” always makes me wince, so imagine an elegant, unpretentious term for this short, perfect, um, novelette. Cheever’s always the master of pinpointing the heartbreak in the blur of modern life, and this, um, novelina winds the strands of several disparate stories—including unrequited love and supermarket terrorism—into a quiet, melancholic whole.

Time Will Darken It by William Maxwell (out of print). A hefty and moving novel, this is the quiet-Midwestern-family book people ought to be crowing about instead of some other dull ones we won’t mention by name. Maxwell knows when to tell you something outright and when to let it slip between the cracks, a rare skill that makes Time Will Darken It read like a thriller in which the danger’s all internal.

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Nobody’s Family Is Going to Change by Louise Fitzhugh (Sunburst, $6). The author of Harriet the Spy tackles all sorts of thorny topics in this clear-eyed view of an African-American family overburdened with so many of said thorninesses that they’re bouncing off the walls. I read this for the first time when I was 9 and it made me permanently uppity.

Now It’s Time to Say Goodbye by Dale Peck (Rob Weisbach Books, $16). I always love it when quiet novelists suddenly produce some sprawling, unruly thing. After two precise and restrained works of fiction, Peck unleashed this gloriously baffling, somewhat allegorical, shamelessly experimental, woolgathery Möbius strip of a book—the sort of work that makes you realize we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg, not only of Peck’s talent but of the novel itself. Critics panned it, but if they’ll follow me down this alley I have a special reply just for them.

Our Spoons Came From Woolworth’s by Barbara Comyns (out of print). This is a bit hard to find, but once you do we’ll run into each other in the C section of used bookstores, looking for all of her wondrously weird work. Half autobiographical bohemia, half fractured surrealist myth, this is a novel in which the room might fill up with water at any moment. Happy swimming.