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A.L. Kennedy | First Sentence
A.L. Kennedy
‘I have never seen anyone eat figs in the street and feel I am unsurprised.’
Amit Chaudhuri | First Sentence
Amit Chaudhuri
‘A scene in which nothing is ostensibly happening will absorb me; so will a paragraph that contains no vital piece of information.’
Ange Mlinko | First Sentence
Ange Mlinko
‘I rediscovered the efficacy of meter (or the ‘contrast between fixity and flux’) when I was stuck in a shark tunnel with my kids and was afraid I was coming down with a panic attack.’
Anjali Joseph | First Sentence
Anjali Joseph
‘I kept returning to the Beckett stories, a favourite since I came upon them in my late teens.’
Ann Beattie | First Sentence
Ann Beattie
‘Several times I’ve wanted to title something one thing, but have realized or been persuaded it isn’t a good idea.’
Cynthia Ozick | First Sentence
Cynthia Ozick
‘Some stories begin with an incident, or a set of enigmatic circumstances, or a scene indelibly witnessed, or the relationship of unlike temperaments, or even something as gossamer as a mood. And then there is the kind of story that is rooted in an idea.’
David Searcy | First Sentence
David Searcy
‘When I was a kid, my family doctor, right through high school, was this wonderful, funny guy with a little Boston Blackie moustache who looked a lot like Burgess Meredith.’
First Sentence: Eliza Griswold
Eliza Griswold
‘This, of course, was years before anyone knew or cared who Boko Haram was.’
First Sentence: Javier Zamora
Javier Zamora
‘Immigration has become a physical thing, like a tumor inside us, between us.’
First Sentence: Louise Erdrich
Louise Erdrich
‘We live in these places out of necessity, lucky to have them out of the terrible explosion of humanity.’
First Sentence: Mary O’Donoghue
Mary O’Donoghue
‘It’s the small stuff – and here I mean the odd particulate matter of daily life – that lets me access the sprawl of a place that wasn’t mine but has incrementally become so.’
