This line from a conversation between a seventy-seven year-old poet and an IRS agent about a poem by James Wright in the short story “Yancey” is vintage Ann Beattie: it’s an astute comment in an unusual situation by characters who come to each other from unanticipated angles, and who … Read More
Tag: best fiction
“It was terribly hot that summer Mr. Robertson left town, and for a long while the river seemed dead.”
What should the first sentence in a great novel do? Set the tone, establish the location and perhaps introduce the main character? The first sentence in Amy and Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout does more than that. It gives us the dying river image, which prepares us for the idea … Read More
“The strangest thing about my wife’s return from the dead was how other people reacted.”
Oh, how I love an unreliable narrator! Our quote is the first sentence of the novel, and it’s clearly a flat-out lie. (The strangest thing about anyone’s return from the dead is that it happened — of course people thought it’s strange.) So, if the main character tells us in … Read More