It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
English writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton is best remembered for the first line of his 1830 novel Paul Clifford (Bookshop|Amazon). The novel opens with “It was a dark and stormy night …” followed by many twists and turns in a long...
Grant shares some favorite bad first lines from novels. This is part of a complete episode.
dayscrapping n.— «I even learned a new word the other day from our friends at Outsell: “dayscrapping,” which refers to the practice some daily newspapers have adopted of publishing or delivering papers only on certain days...
caravanning n.— «Wilson & Co., like other local real estate firms, hosts broker open houses, a practice also called caravanning. One firm organizes a collective open house in the same area and allows agents who represent buyers or...
second n.— «From time to time, he engages friends who double as trainers, or “seconds” as they are called in chess parlance. These seconds are players of reasonable playing strength who, ahead of important competitions, study various...