Focus: 100 Best First Lines from Novels — January / February 2006

100 Best First Lines from Novels

Volume 27, Number 2
January-February 2006

Excerpts available through Project Muse; full articles available to Project Muse subscribers.

Charles B. Harris’s “Introduction to Focus: In the Beginning Was the Word” and “100 Best First Lines from Novels”

Michael Bérubé, Stephen Burn, David Cowart, Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Andrew Ervin, Tom Grimes, Charles B. Harris, Kit Hume, Robert L. McLaughlin, Lance Olsen, Sally E. Parry, Nancy Pearl, James Phelan, James Schiff, Susan Strehle, Trey Strecker, and Eric Miles Williamson’s “Opening Lines: A Congeries of Reflections”

Feature: Literary Debuts

Mike Daily reviews Michael Mejia’s Forgetfulness

Louis McKee reviews Lee Briccetti’s Day Mark

Feature: The Twenties Generation

Nicholas Birns reviews Gerald Stem’s Everything Is Burning

Fred Muratori reviews Irving Feldman’s Collected Poems: 1954-2004

M. L. Liebler reviews Jack Gilbert’s Refusing Heaven: Poems

Book Reviews

Laura Wright reviews Eleni Sikelianos’s The Book of Jon and The California Poem

Paula Koneazny reviews Wayde Compton’s Performance Bond

Gabriel Miller reviews Daniel Fuchs’s The Golden West: Hollywood Stories

Stephen Burn reviews Lee Siegel’s Who Wrote the Book of Love?

Regina Weinreich reviews eds. Alan Kaufman, Neil Ortenberg, and Barney Rosset’s The Outlaw Bible of American Literature and R. Crumb and Peter Poplaski’s The R. Crumb Handbook

Kristin Thiel reviews Lynda Schor’s The Body Parts Shop

Jocelyn Emerson reviews Denise Duhamel’s Two and Two: Poems

Pawel Frelik reviews William T. Vollmann’s Europe Central

Joseph Donahue reviews Ann Lauterbach’s The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience and Hum

Larry Smith reviews Sam Hamill’s Almost Paradise: New and Selected Poems and Translations

Amy Sayre-Roberts reviews Nurla Amat’s Queen Cocaine

Don Melichar reviews Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men

Paul Keyes reviews Kirby Olson’s Andrei Codrescu and the Myth of America

Larry Fondation reviews Steve Almond’s The Evil B.B. Chow and Alan Michael Parker’s Other Stories and Cry Uncle

Justin Taylor reviews Aimee Bender’s Willful Creatures

Richard Grayson reviews ed. Jonathan Ames’s Sexual Metamorphosis: An Anthology of Transsexual Memoirs

Davis Schneiderman reviews J. G. Ballard’s J. G. Ballard: Quotes

Ryan Smith reviews Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Hummingbird’s Daughter

Departments

Page 2- From an Executive Editor

By the Editors- Recent Publications