Tuesday, April 26th, 2011
Icebreaker (The Blog)
The opening line of Hard Rain Falling
Three Indians were standing out in front of the post office that hot summer morning when the motorcycle blazed down Walnut Street and caused Mel Weatherwax to back his pickup truck over the cowboy who was loading sacks of lime.
Monday, December 20th, 2010
Icebreaker (The Blog)
The opening sentence of Two Girls, Fat and Thin
I entered the strange world of Justine Shade via a message on the bulletin board in a laundromat filled with bitterness and the hot breath of dryers.
Tuesday, June 29th, 2010
Icebreaker (The Blog)
The opening sentence of The Boarding-House
“I am dying,” said William Wagner Bird on the night of August 13th, turning his face towards the wall for privacy, sighing at the little bunches of forget-me-not on the wallpaper.
Friday, June 11th, 2010
Icebreaker (The Blog)
The opening sentence of Fever Pitch
I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain or disruption it would bring with it.
Thursday, May 13th, 2010
Icebreaker (The Blog)
The opening sentence of Seize the Day
When it came to concealing his troubles, Tommy Wilhelm was not less capable than the next fellow.
Monday, April 26th, 2010
Icebreaker (The Blog)
The opening sentence of Letty Fox: Her Luck
One hot night last spring, after waiting fruitlessly for a call from my then lover, with whom I had quarreled the same afternoon, and finding one of my black moods on me, I flung out of my lonely room on the ninth floor (unlucky number) in a hotel in lower Fifth Avenue and rushed into the streets of the Village, feeling bad.
Thursday, April 1st, 2010
Icebreaker (The Blog)
The opening sentence of The Giant’s House
I do not love mankind.
Thursday, March 18th, 2010
Icebreaker (The Blog)
The opening sentence of Suttree
Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming in the wake of the watertrucks and now when the drunk and the homeless have washed up in the lee of walls in alleys or abandoned lots and cats go forth highshouldered and lean in the grim perimeters about, now in these sootblacked brick or cobbled corridors where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors no soul shall walk save you.
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
Icebreaker (The Blog)
The opening sentence of High Lonesome
Since he had returned from Korea he and his wife lived in mutual disregard, which turned three times a month into animal passion then diminished on the sharp incline to hatred, at last collecting in time into silent equal fatigue.
Thursday, February 11th, 2010
Icebreaker (The Blog)
The opening sentence of Radical Chic
At 2 or 3 or 4 a.m., somewhere along in there, on August 25, 1966, his forty-eighth birthday, in fact, Leonard Bernstein woke up in the dark in a state of wild alarm.
Friday, December 18th, 2009
Icebreaker (The Blog)
The opening sentence of The Man Who Watched Trains Go By
As far as Kees Popinga was personally concerned, it should be admitted that at eight in the evening there was still time: his fate, among others, had yet to be sealed.
Monday, November 23rd, 2009
Icebreaker (The Blog)
The opening sentence of Girls in Their Married Bliss
Not long ago Kate Brady and I were having a few gloomy gin fizzes up London, bemoaning the fact that nothing would ever improve, that we’d die the way we were — enough to eat, married, dissatisfied.
Wednesday, October 21st, 2009
Icebreaker (The Blog)
The opening sentence of Secretariat: The Making of a Champion
It was almost midnight in Virginia, late for the farmlands north of Richmond, when the breathing quickened in the stall, the phone rang in the Gentry home, and two men came out the front door, hastily crossing the lawn to the car.
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009
Icebreaker (The Blog)
The opening sentence of The Emperor of Ice-Cream
The Divine Infant of Prague was only eleven inches tall yet heavy enough to break someone’s toes if he fell off the dresser.
Monday, August 24th, 2009
Icebreaker (The Blog)
The opening sentence of The Good Soldier Svejk
“And so they’ve killed our Ferdinand,” said the charwoman to Mr Svejk, who had left military service years before, after having been finally certified by an army medical board as an imbecile, and now lived by selling dogs — ugly, mongrel monstrosities whose pedigrees he forged.
Friday, August 14th, 2009
Icebreaker (The Blog)
The opening sentence of Afterwards, You’re a Genius
More than a few years ago, when I was in a bad way, wallowing in a sob story about an actress who’d exchanged me for a used-car salesman in California, I went to see a psychic.
Friday, July 31st, 2009
Icebreaker (The Blog)
The opening sentence of My War Gone By, I Miss It So
There were places among the crowded trees where the birdsong dropped away to nothing, shaded clearings with a sound vacuum; once you had stepped in no noise could reach you from the outside world except the rustling summer breeze, and you did not want to listen to that too carefully, for if you were alone your mind began to play tricks and it was more than just the grass that you heard whispering.
Friday, July 24th, 2009
Icebreaker (The Blog)
The opening sentence of The Story of Lucy Gault
Captain Everard Gault wounded the boy in the right shoulder on the night of June the twenty-first, nineteen twenty-one.
Thursday, July 16th, 2009
Icebreaker (The Blog)
The opening sentence of How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read
There is more than one way not to read, the most radical of which is not to open a book at all.
Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009
Icebreaker (The Blog)
The opening sentence of A Prayer for Owen Meany
I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice — not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
Friday, May 15th, 2009
Icebreaker (The Blog)
The opening sentence of Breakfast of Champions
This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.
(The new issue of Harper’s includes a story by Vonnegut called “Little Drops of Water.” It’s part of a collection of his previously unpublished stories, Look at the Birdie
Tuesday, April 21st, 2009
Icebreaker (The Blog)
The opening sentence of The Girls of Slender Means
Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions.
Friday, April 10th, 2009
Icebreaker (The Blog)
The opening sentence of Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen
In the summer of 1980, in the Archer City Dairy Queen, while nursing a lime Dr Pepper (a delicacy strictly local, unheard of even in the next Dairy Queen down the road — Olney’s, eighteen miles south — but easily obtainable by anyone willing to buy a lime and a Dr Pepper), I opened a book called Illuminations
and read Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller,” nominally a study of or reflection on the stories of Nikolay Leskov, but really (I came to feel, after several rereadings), an examination, and a profound one, of the growing obsolescence of what might be called practical memory and the consequent diminution of the power of oral narrative in our twentieth-century lives.
