Daniel Handler

Flannery Culp wants you to know the whole story of her spectacularly awful senior year. Tyrants, perverts, tragic crushes, gossip, cruel jokes, and the hallucinatory effects of absinthe -- Flannery and the seven other friends in the Basic Eight have suffered through it all. But now, on tabloid television, they're calling Flannery a murderer, which is a total lie. It's true that high school can be so stressful sometimes. And it's true that sometimes a girl just has to kill someone. But Flannery wants you to know that she's not a murderer at all -- she's a murderess.

A Novel

The Basic Eight

avarni

the only way to really look at Italy is to stop gaping at all the Catholicism and just sit down and have some coffee.

Once I’ve started something, I have to finish it, no matter how bad it is.

“–and I go to Italy, the most romantic country in the world, and the only man who makes my heart beat faster is carved out of marble.”

So, over dinner with Maman, Jennifer Rose Milton conceived of the Grand Opera Breakfast Club, an organization so pretentious that no one but our friends would join it

Idea for a story: A man falls in love with a woman and writes her letter after letter. We never read the letters she writes to him. His love grows and grows through the letters. He can’t stand it anymore. Then something drastic happens…but what?

Showing up early for her class and thus being alone with her felt like showing up early for Judgment Day and getting to hang out with the angels before the crowds arrive.

 “Relax,” she said. “You will be wise. You’re young. You can’t have everything right away.”

I looked for V when I got off the bus, hoping that V’s gorgeous car could become a permanent morning motif, but as yesterday’s ride was added, as you remember, one year later in rewrites, V of course was nowhere to be seen.

the evening was magical, magical, magical and I want to write it down before it evaporates into the night air like streams of sensual smoke.

loud music during cooking,quiet during dinner. Immutable.

The Basic Eight quotes

Join the club