Chaney Kwak (Fiction, June 2009) appears in conversation with the legendary Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) to discuss The Passenger at Green Apple Books in San Francisco. Handler is the author of seven novels, including Bottle Grove.

In March 2019, the Viking Sky cruise ship was struck by a bomb cyclone in the Arctic Sea. Rocked by 60-foot swells and 87-mile-per-hour gales, the ship lost power and began to drift straight toward the notoriously dangerous Hustadvika coast in Norway. The Passenger: How a Travel Writer Learned to Love Cruises & Other Lies from a Sinking Ship is the suspenseful, harrowing, funny, touching story by one passenger who contemplated death aboard that ship. The Passenger takes readers for an unforgettable journey from the Norwegian coast to the South China Sea, from post-WWII Korea to pandemic-struck San Francisco.

Kwak weaves his personal experience into events spanning decades and continents to explore the serendipity and relationships that move humans. Chaney Kwak has been traversing the globe for more than a decade to write about food and travel. His work appears regularly in newspapers such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, as well as magazines such as Afar, Condé Nast Traveler, and Travel + Leisure. Mr. Kwak teaches nonfiction writing at the Stanford Continuing Studies program and lives in San Francisco.

Daniel Handler is the author of seven novels, including Why We Broke Up, We Are Pirates, All The Dirty Parts and, most recently, Bottle Grove. As Lemony Snicket, he is responsible for numerous books for children, including the thirteen-volume A Series of Unfortunate Events, the four-volume All the Wrong Questions, and The Dark, which won the Charlotte Zolotow Award. 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.