Adverbs

‘One of our most dazzling literary conjurers shuffles the deck of contemporary consciousness and desire. A thrilling feat of tragic magic.’ - Michael Chabon Adverbs marks the return of Daniel Handler to adult fiction as he tackles life’s most complicated and compelling noun: love. In a series of intersecting narratives that explore variations of that ineffable feeling, Handler crafts a moving and shifting story exploring the frustrating glory of this most troublesome of emotions. two friends, one dying and one lonely; an adolescent’s first homosexual stirrings for his sister’s boyfriend; a doomed, enormously inappropriate tryst between a taxi driver and his passenger; a high-school crush that falls painfully short of a movie projected on a grungy screen. Handler’s characters experience love in all of its dark, triumphant, devastating and sneaky forms. In Adverbs, Daniel Handler reveals to us how the most universal of themes is also the most unknown. ‘With Adverbs, Daniel Handler, who’s always been a great stylist, goes ten steps further, to become something like an American Nabokov. He and the Russian man share a rapturous love of words, a quick and delicate wit, a lyrical elegance that makes every single sentence silly with pleasure. On a broader level, Adverbs describes adolescence, friendship and love with such freshness and power that you feel drunk and beaten up but still wanting to leave your own world and enter the one Handler’s created. Anyone who lives to read gorgeous writing will want to lick this book and sleep with it between their legs. those who want their books to read like newspapers should read newspapers.’ - Dave Eggers