Sentences vs. Paragraphs—Which is Better?

Lucy Corin is a writer who likes sentences. Daniel Handler, another writer, likes paragraphs. These longtime colleagues are prepared to publicly argue over who's right. Join them for an illustrated conversation of the ways words work, what literature is made of, and the triumph of specific peculiarity over the corporate juggernaut steamrolling individual experience.

A winner may or may not be declared.

Doors open at 6 p.m. at The Firehouse at Fort Mason Center, with drinks and light bites to follow in the Arion Press Gallery.

The Kirkpatrick Speaker Series brings luminaries from the literary and visual arts together to speak about the vital place of books in public life. The Series is made possible by the generous support of Taylor Kirkpatrick.

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Lucy Corin is the author of the novel The Swank Hotel, as well as the story collections One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses and The Entire Predicament, and the novel Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls. Her work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, Harper’s Magazine, Ploughshares, Bomb, Tin House Magazine, and the New American Stories anthology from Vintage Contemporaries. She is the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Rome Prize, a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a 2023 Guggenheim fellowship. She teaches at the University of California at Davis and lives in Berkeley.

Daniel Handler is the author of seven novels, including Why We Broke Up, All The Dirty Parts, Bottle Grove, and the 2024 memoir And Then? And Then? What Else? As Lemony Snicket, he is the author of far too many books for children including Poison for Breakfast, the four-volume All The Wrong Questions, and the thirteen-volume A Series of Unfortunate Events. His books have sold more than 70 million copies and have been translated into 40 languages, and have been adapted for film, stage and television, including the recent adaptation of A Series of Unfortunate Events for which he was awarded both the Peabody and the Writers Guild of America awards. Most recently, he wrote the morals and introduction for Arion’s Laureate Edition of Fables of Aesop. Daniel lives in San Francisco with illustrator Lisa Brown, to whom he is married and with whom he has collaborated on several books and one son.