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86Famous First Sentences: Robinson Crusoe
Daniel Defoe was a prodigious writer, in the sense that he was able to describe events in wonderfully clear detail. His Moll Flanders is an extravagant exercise in financial machinations, as Moll contrives...
19 comments
82Famous First Sentences: Pride and Prejudice
One of the most famous opening sentences in Western Literature is the crisply arch first statement in Jane Austen's Pride And Prejudice (1813): It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in...
57 comments
80Famous First Sentences: The Razor's Edge
There is something quietly unassuming and gently diffident about Somerset Maugham's writing that must surely be a reflection of some sector of his soul, despite the public extravagance of that portion of his...
15 comments
77Book Review: Almost Moon: Alice Sebold
First let me introduce myself. I currently teach American Literature, Ethics, World Religions and Social & Political Philosophy at a prep school. In the past, I have taught courses at the university level. I...
9 comments
86Famous First Sentences: One Hundred Years of Solitude
I hesitated before choosing a novel written in Spanish; however, since Gabriel García Márquez not only endorsed Gregory Rabassa's fine translation of Cien años de soledad but said he liked it better in...
34 comments
69My Sisters First Sentence
When we were young we weren't allowed to watch television, my father claimed it made for idiots. We grew up traveling all over the United States and Europe. So the events in our lives cannot be blamed on...
0 comments
84Famous First Sentences: Finnegans Wake
This starts off as one of the most beautiful opening sentences I've ever read; and, no matter what you might think of the novel itself (if any of you get all the way through, would you let me know how it...
19 comments
69Famous First Sentences: The Dharma Bums
There is a liberating aspect to modern American story-telling that mixes the wiles of the raconteur with the confessions of an honest, but suffering, heart. Even before Holden Caulfield so famously...
16 comments
72Famous First Sentences: Sometimes A Great Notion
Ken Kesey is famous for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), and rightly so; however, I decided to choose Kesey's second, grimly lyrical novel for this series. Sometimes A Great Notion (1964) is literally...
11 comments
