Daniel Handler Has A New YA Novel Coming Soon

If you are interested in reading stories about happy endings... well, surprisingly, Lemony Snicket might actually have something for you (and yes, there's an innuendo in there). In a sharp departure from A Series of Unfortunate Events, Lemony Snicket has written a book about sex — or rather Daniel Handler has, the author behind the Lemony Snicket pseudonym. The rest of the world may be counting down the days until Count Olaf bursts onto Netflix in the Series of Unfortunate Events TV series — but Daniel Handler's got a less child-friendly audience in mind for his latest novel.

All The Dirty Parts is about teenager Cole, a sex-obsessed high school student. Yeah, these definitely aren't the Baudelaires. Of course, this isn't the first time Daniel Handler has written outside the Unfortunate Events world; the popular YA novel Why We Broke Up is just one example of the author's success since his V.F.D. shenanigans (um, did we ever find out what that stood for?) — but it may be the biggest departure from the Lemony Snicket we know and love. But if you're worrying that sexuality is an inappropriate topic for his fans, Daniel Handler actually has a very wise response. He told Entertainment Weekly, "it’s funny, isn’t it, that we worry about young people reading about sex, instead of, say, people shooting each other with laser beams. This anxiety is precisely what led to the novel." You've got to hand it to him, that's a fair point.

Handler also told Entertainment Weekly that his biggest struggle while writing All the Dirty Parts was "balancing a feminist consciousness with a desire to write honestly about sexuality in young men" — and so here's hoping that he pulled that off. Young men do deserve to see their sexuality presented in a book in a way that will help them understand it, and if Handler can write it in a way that remains faithful to their experience without perpetuating any of the damaging ideas about women and sex that they may have picked up, well, that's a feat of genius that even Klaus Baudelaire would be proud of.

All the Dirty Parts comes out on August 29.