10 Comments
Mar 1, 2023Liked by Adam Sternbergh

For me, the all-time king of this is Charles Portis. Levi Stahl posted all of his page ones (there's only five novels, so easy) on twitter: https://twitter.com/levistahl/status/1229556525661859841

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Feb 27, 2023Liked by Adam Sternbergh

I can't help myself. The first one that came to mind was Don Winslow's infamous opening line to his short story "The San Diego Zoo" from his collection "Broken":

No one knows how the chimp got the revolver.

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Feb 26, 2023Liked by Adam Sternbergh

"When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon."

James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

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Feb 26, 2023Liked by Adam Sternbergh

Related, but tangential:

Neil Gaiman’s introduction to the 2016 Penguin edition of Frank Herbert’s Dune writes about the opening line of William Gibson’s 'Neuromancer': “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” He points out that because this was written in 1983, it invokes a very different image than it would today. In his 1997 novel 'Nowhere', Gaiman tipped his hat to Gibson with the following line: “The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel.” As you point out, with physical character descriptions in pre-cinema literature that now seem antiquated, I cannot read a book without first knowing when it was published. Without that context, things might not make sense, or in Gibson’s case, make a different sense without proper historical context. Simpletons always fixate on how accurately science fiction has predicted the future which is nonsense. Intelligent sci-fi is reflecting on the present by projecting a future, and one can literally get lost without knowing when the present is.

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What's the first opening from?

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