City Arts & Lectures will present an evening with
Adam Gopnik



Self-described "comic-sentimental essayist" Adam Gopnik is a New Yorker critic-at-large and the author of Paris to the Moon, a collection of rollicking and tender essays about the five years he and his family lived in the "City of Lights." When asked what he most misses about Paris, Gopnik once said, "I miss the quality of reflection." In his popular "Paris Journals," Gopnik reflected on the city he dreamed of living in since he was eight years old. As he extolled the rich culture and idiosyncrasies of Parisian life, the writer also struggled with the day-to-day routines in an unfamiliar city - from joining a gym to purchasing a rotisserie chicken - and his newness to fatherhood. For his adept essays, France's foremost newspaper Le Monde called him a "witty and Voltairean commentator on French life." Gopnik edited Americans in Paris, a literary anthology spanning three centuries of American writing about Paris. Gopnik most recently completed an adventure novel for young people called The King in the Window. His writing has won the National Magazine Award for Essays and Criticism and the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting.



In conversation with Daniel Handler



Under the nom de plume Lemony Snicket, Daniel Handler is the author of the outrageously funny and macabre collection of children's novels, A Series of Unfortunate Events. The mock-gothic serial follows the Baudelaire orphans through a variety of misfortunes and bad luck. The Unauthorized Autobiography of Lemony Snicket further explores Handler's highly imaginative world of gloom and literary wit. The native San Franciscan is also the author of two novels for adults, The Basic Eight and Watch Your Mouth. Handler is a self-taught accordionist.



Benefiting The 826 Valencia Scholarship Program