Lemony Snicket 101

For the non-kid readers out there, a handy primer on the phenomenon of Lemony Snicket in this story on NPR. The audio story is a little over 8 minutes, but there's also an excerpt from the first book on that page.

If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle. This is because not very many happy things happened in the lives of the three Baudelaire youngsters. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire were intelligent children, and they were charming, and resourceful, and had pleasant facial features, but they were extremely unlucky, and most everything that happened to them was rife with misfortune, misery, and despair. I'm sorry to tell you this, but that is how the story goes.

Note that "Lemony Snicket" is not a character, but the recorder of the Unfortunate Events. The books are actually authored under this pseudonym, and I never even knew the real author's name until I came across this story. BTW, the author gets immense credit for having never seen the Cat In The Hat movie, even though the movie treatment of his book has the same director of photography as that film.