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...
Noah in Charleston, South Carolina, wonders about the origin of hangover, “the unpleasant physical results of drinking too much alcohol.” Does it come from the old penny hang, also called a hangover, a place where people without a place...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski’s puzzle this week was inspired by the Gersberms meme, and involves adding R sounds to book titles to create books with entirely different plots. For example what George Orwell novella would be about a horse, a duck, a...
Some novels grab you from the get-go. “I am an invisible man.” “Call me Ishmael.” “The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.” Martha...