First Paragraphs

I enjoy seeing how an author chooses to begin.

Cover of Changing Planes

Changing Planes

Ursula K. Le Guin

The range of an airplane—a few thousand miles, the other side of the world, coconut palms, glaciers, the poles, the Poles, a lama, a llama, etc.—is pitifully limited compared to the vast extent and variety of experience provided, to those who know how to use it, by the airport.

Cover of Death of a Salesman

Death of a Salesman

Arthur Miller

Linda: Willy!\nWilly: It's alright. I came back.\nLinda: Why What happened? Did something happen Willy?\nWilly: No, nothing happened.\nLinda: You didn't smash the car did you?"

Cover of In Ascension

In Ascension

Martin MacInnes

I was born in the lowest part of the country, 22 feet beneath the sea. When my sister arrived three years later we moved south into the city proper, Rotterdam’s northern district. The land was newly excavated, freshly claimed from the seafloor, dredged by ships and reinforced by concrete. Parts of the street came loose, the ground underneath still soft. I remember burning incense, a brackish smell indoors, as if every moment were a spell, a scene that had to be called into being.

Cover of Letters to a Young Poet

Letters to a Young Poet

Rainer Maria Rilke

Dear Sir,\nYour letter only reached me a few days ago. Let me thank you for the great and endearing trust it shows. There is little more I can do. I cannot go into the nature of your verses, for any critical intention is too remote from me. There is nothing less apt to touch a work of art than critical words: all we end up with there is more or less felicitous misunderstandings. Things are not all as graspable and sayable as on the whole we are led to believe; most events are unsayable, occur in a space that no word has ever penetrated, and most unsayable of all are works of art, mysterious existences whose life endures alongside ours, which passes away.

Cover of Something in the Woods Loves You

Something in the Woods Loves You

Jarod K. Anderson

There's an old story about great blue herons. It says that while hunting the twilight shallows, herons can produce a strange, luminescent powder, pluck it from betweee their feathers with their spear-like beaks, and sprinkle it on the dark water to attract fish.

Cover of Hell Yeah or No

Hell Yeah or No

Derek Sivers

You know that feeling you have after a big meal? When you’re so full that you don’t want anything more?

Cover of Anything You Want

Anything You Want

Derek Sivers

From 1998 to 2008, I had this wild experience of starting a little hobby, accidentally growing it into a big business, and then selling it for $22 million. So now people want to hear my thoughts.

Cover of East of Eden

East of Eden

John Steinbeck

The Salinas Valley is in Northern California. It is a long narrow swale between two ranges of mountains, and the Salinas River winds and twists up the center until it falls at last into Monterey Bay.

Cover of The Metaphysical Club

The Metaphysical Club

Louis Menand

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was an officer in the Union Army. He stood six feet three inches tall and had a soldierly bearing. In later life, he loved to use military metaphors in his speeches and his conversation; he didn’t mind being referred to good-naturedly as Captain Holmes; and he wore his enormous military mustaches until his death in 1935, at the age of ninety-three. The war was the central experience of his life, and he kept its memory alive. Every year he drank a glass of wine in observance of the anniversary of the battle Antietam, where he had been shot in the neck and left, briefly behind enemy lines, for dead.

Cover of Postcolonial Love Poem

Postcolonial Love Poem

Natalie Diaz

I’ve been taught bloodstones can cure a snakebite, can stop the bleeding—most people forgot this when the war ended. The war ended depending on which war you mean: those we started, before those, millennia ago and onward, those which started me, which I lost and won—these ever-blooming wounds.

Cover of Gideon the Ninth

Gideon the Ninth

Tamsyn Muir

IN THE MYRIADIC YEAR OF OUR LORD—the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death!—Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth.

Cover of Klara and the Sun

Klara and the Sun

Kazuo Ishiguro

When we were new, Rosa and I were mid-store, on the magazines table side, and could see through more than half of the window. So we were able to watch the outside – the office workers hurrying by, the taxis, the runners, the tourists, Beggar Man and his dog, the lower part of the RPO Building. Once we were more settled, Manager allowed us to walk up to the front until we were right behind the window display, and then we could see how tall the RPO Building was. And if we were there at just the right time, we would see the Sun on his journey, crossing between the building tops from our side over to the RPO Building side.

Cover of The Overstory

The Overstory

Richard Powers

First there was nothing. Then there was everything

Cover of Dancing at the Rascal Fair

Dancing at the Rascal Fair

Ivan Doig

To say the truth, it was not how I expected—stepping off toward America past a drowned horse.

Cover of Gasoline

Gasoline

Gregory Corso

O anti-verdurous phallic were’t not for your pouring weight looming in tears like a sick tree or your ever-gaudy-comfort jabbing your city’s much wrinkled sky you’d seem an absurd Babel squatting before mortal millions

Cover of The Phantom Tollbooth

The Phantom Tollbooth

Norton Juster, Jules Feiffer, illus.

There was once a boy named Milo who didn’t know what to do with himself—not just sometimes, but always.

Cover of The Best of Saki

The Best of Saki

Saki

After all,” said the Duchess vaguely, “there are certain things you can’t get away from. Right and wrong, good conduct and moral rectitude, have certain well-defined limits.”

Cover of House Made of Dawn

House Made of Dawn

N. Scott Momaday

Dypaloh. There was a house made of dawn. It was made of pollen and of rain, and the land was very old and everlasting. There were many colors on the hills, and the plain was bright with different-colored clays and sands. Red and blue and spotted horses grazed in the plain, and there was a dark wilderness on the mountains beyond. The land was still and strong. It was beautiful all around.

Cover of On Writing

On Writing

Stephen King

I was stunned by Mary Karr’s memoir, The Liars’ Club. Not just by its ferocity, its beauty, and by her delightful grasp of the vernacular, but by its totality—she is a woman who remembers everything about her early years.”

Cover of The Captive Mind

The Captive Mind

Czeslaw Milosz

It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the real­ization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy. Their bread, their work, their private lives began to depend on this or that decision in disputes on principles to which, until then, they had never paid any attention. In their eyes, the philosopher had always been a sort of dreamer whose divagations had no effect on real­ity. The average human being, even if he had once been exposed to it, wrote philosophy off as utterly impractical and useless. Therefore the great intellec­tual work of the Marxists could easily pass as just one more variation on a sterile pastime. Only a few in­dividuals understood the causes and probable conse­quences of this general indifference.

Cover of A Canticle for Leibowitz

A Canticle for Leibowitz

Walter M. Miller

Brother Francis Gerard of Utah might never have discovered the blessed documents, had it not been for the pilgrim with girded loins who appeared during that young novice’s Lenten fast in the desert.

Cover of Man’s Search for Meaning

Man’s Search for Meaning

Viktor E. Frankl

This book does not claim to be an account of facts and events but of personal experiences, experiences which millions of prisoners have suffered time and again. It is the inside story of a concentration camp, told by one of its survivors. This tale is not concerned with the great horrors, which have already been described often enough (though less often believed), but with the multitude of small torments. In other words, it will try to answer this question: How was everyday life in a concentration camp reflected in the mind of the average prisoner?

Cover of All the Pretty Horses

All the Pretty Horses

Cormac McCarthy

The Candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door. He took off his hat and came slowly forward. The floorboards creaked under his boots. In his black suit he stood in the dark glass where the lilies leaned so palely from their waisted cutglass vase. Along the cold hallway behind him hung the portraits of forebears only dimly known to him all framed in glass and dimly lit above the narrow wainscotting. He looked down at the guttered candlestub. He pressed his thumbprint in the warm wax pooled on the oak veneer. Lastly he looked at the face so caved and drawn among the folds of funeral cloth, the yellowed moustache, the eyelids paper thin. That was not sleeping. That was not sleeping.

Cover of All the Names

All the Names

José Saramago

Above the door frame is a long, narrow plaque of enamelled metal. The black letters set against a white background say Central Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths. Here and there the enamel is cracked and chipped. The door is an old door, the most recent layer of brown paint is beginning to peel, and the exposed grain of the wood is reminiscent of a striped pelt. There are five windows along the facade. As soon as you cross the threshold, you notice the smell of old paper. It's true that not a day passes without new pieces of paper entering the Central Registry, papers referring to individuals of the male sex and of the female sex who continue to be born in the outside world, but the smell never changes, in the first place, because the fate of all paper, from the moment it leaves the factory, is to begin to grow old, in the second place, because on the older pieces of paper, but often on the new paper too, not a day passes without someone's inscribing it with the causes of death and the respective places and dates, each contributing its own particular smells, not always offensive to the olfactory mucous membrane, a case in point being the aromatic effluvia which, from time to time, waft lightly through the Central Registry, and which the more discriminating noses identify as a perfume that is half rose and half chrysanthemum.