Period pieces

One of the things I look forward to most every year is the release of the annual ‘Best American Nonrequired Reading’ collection. I don’t get out of my little 5-blogs-and-the-NY-Times Internet fortress very often, so the assorted short stories, commencement speeches, and comics in the BANR are pretty much the only way I stay in touch with the assorted awesomeness that I’m too lazy to seek out on my own. I just finished this year’s edition during my trip, and I’ll be typing up the best bits in the next few days.

First up, ‘The Best American First Sentences of Novels’:

Maps for Lost Lovers: Shamas stands in the open door and watches the earth, the magnet that it is, pulling snowflakes out of the sky towards itself.

The Follies: I was looking for a quiet place to die.

The Testing of Luther Albright: The year I lost my wife and son, my son performed nine separate tests of my character.

Upstate: Dear Natasha, Baby, the first thing I need to know from you is do you believe I killed my father?

Slow Man: The blow catches him from the right, sharp and surprising and painful, like a bolt of electricity, lifting him off the bicycle.

Specimen Days: Walt said that the dead turned the grass, but there was no grass where they’d buried Simon.

26a: Before they were born, Georgia and Bessie experienced a moment of indecision.

The Devil of Nanking: To those who fight and rage against superstition, I say only this: Why?

House of Thieves: The sun is shining, mynah birds are hopping, palm trees are swaying, so what.

The Company Car: There are times on this drive when I have been tempted to turn to Dorie and shout, ‘Our parents have been dead for years! Our father died while piloting a La-Z-Boy into oblivion, the remote still warm in his fingers! Our mother died in her bedroom; her last whispered words being “More! More!” That’s what happened to our parents! Not this! Not this!’

Saturday: Some hours before dawn Henry Perown, a neurosurgeon, wakes to find himself already in motion, pushing back the covers from a sitting position, and then rising to his feet.

Cold Skin: We are never very far from those we hate.

The Accidental: My mother began me one evening in 1968 on a table in the café of the town’s only cinema.

March: This is what I wrote to her: The clouds embossed the sky.