Loren reviews Falling Glass: “Tropes are simultaneously the biggest strength and weakness of genre fiction… Crime writer Adrian McKinty has regularly folded stream-of-consciousness into his hardboiled thrillers, adding a literary tang to bad-men-with-guns tales.”

Shirley Jackson’s famous short story, “The Lottery,” begins like this:

The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o’clock; in some towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 2th. but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took less than two hours, so it could begin at ten o’clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner.

It’s a chilling tale, you may remember, and if you don’t, you can read it all here. I didn’t remember the first outrage to it back in 1948. “‘The Lottery’ was met with much negativity which surprised both the author and The New Yorker, and ultimately caused many subscribers to cancel their subscriptions and send hate mail.”

Nowadays, they tell the same moral in children’s movies. I remember Rabbit in one of the clumsier Winnie the Pooh movies singing about following the map over your own eyes. Ignore your senses; follow tradition and the book–which was to say how ridiculous it is to follow anything but your own senses. But Miss Jackson may have intended far more than that in “The Lottery.” Her NY Times obit states:

“Shirley Jackson wrote in two styles. She could describe the delights and turmoils of ordinary domestic life with detached hilarity; and she could, with cryptic symbolism, write a tenebrous horror story in the Gothic mold in which abnormal behavior seemed perilously ordinary.

In either genre, she wrote with remarkable tautness and economy of style, and her choice of words and phrases was unerring in building a story’s mood.”

Recommended by Jeffrey Overstreet, if it can make it to a theater near you.

Here’s a list of opening lines from various novels. The potential titles follow. There will be no prize, except the satisfaction of a job well done. I will suggest that I would score well on a quiz like this, but I’m not taking it, am I?

1. “Who is John Galt?” The light was ebbing, and Eddie Willers could not distinguish the bum’s face.
2. “I have been here before,” I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were white with fool’s-parsley and meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendor, such as our climate affords once or twice a year, when leaf and flower and bird and sun-lit stone and shadow seem all to proclaim the glory of God; and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, is was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.
3. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
4. Hazel Motes sat at a forward angle on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car. The train was racing through tree tops that fell away at intervals and showed the sun standing, very red, on the edge of the farthest woods.
5. It was Wang Lung’s marriage day. At first, opening his eyes in the blackness of the curtains about his bed, he could not think why the dawn seemed different from any other. The house was still except for the faint, gasping cough of his old father, who room was opposite to his own across the middle room.

Choose from these titles:

• Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
• Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand
• Absalom, Absalom, by William Faulkner
• 1984, by George Orwell
• The Good Earth, by Pearl Buck
• Wise Blood, by Flannery O’Connor
• Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh

Adam Kirsch writes about the novel and our current instant-information environment.

In our lifetime, no event has ignited the human instinct to find and create meaning like the 9/11 attacks. From the first moment, Americans spoke of the catastrophe as unprecedented in its enormous deadliness and sheer surprise; it was natural to feel that America had changed forever in a single morning. But on reflection, it’s clear that neither the scope nor the surprise nor the sheer malevolence of the 9/11 attacks was new in human history. Ten years later, it seems that the real uniqueness of 9/11 was, rather, the sheer speed with which we spectators moved from seeing the disaster to interpreting it.

Though many have written fictional accounts of the September 11 attack and some have argued against the need, Kirsch says the definitive 9/11 novel has yet to be written and may never be. (via Books, Inq.)