a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by user-inactivated
user-inactivated  ·  3573 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What are some great short stories?

It's neat. I like that story.

Dialogue as your opening line is sort of a way to evade the entire question, right? It can be done really well, too.





briandmyers  ·  3573 days ago  ·  link  ·  

This is out of place, but - my wife's favourite first line (not from a short story though), is from "Earthly Powers" by Anthony Burgess :

    It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.
user-inactivated  ·  3573 days ago  ·  link  ·  

You may not have seen the thread tng was referencing.

I have seen that line before, but not read that book. I think that's a problem with iconic first lines: they get spread around and everyone knows his name's Ishmael but they don't know a damn thing about the rest of the book, or they jump to conclusions about it.