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A novel’s first line is saddled with an extraordinary responsibility: to not only establish a story’s start but also to impart with indelible effect the writer’s voice. Asking someone to identify the best first line of all time tends to make people skittish, so I asked The Atlantic’s writers and editors instead: What is one of the best first lines in modern literature?
“Sth, I know that woman.”
Toni Morrison’s fiction contains a rich seam of great first lines. This one, from Jazz, is my favorite, for its immediacy and its intimacy. From the start, the narrator and her words have an arresting physicality, and the reader is put in the position of question asker and gossip hound, wondering whether the speaker is exasperated or disgusted (or if she relishes that disgust).
In Morrison’s own telling, the line emerged out of frustration. She wanted her novel to express the spirit of metropolitan Black life in the 1920s and for her prose to embody the essence of jazz, with its genius for spontaneous invention. But her original opener felt too predictable. Irritated, she flung her pencil aside and sucked her teeth. When she set that exclamation down on paper—sth, evoking an intake of breath—she found the voice of her story. Following that voice, Morrison achieved the unity between sound and meaning that she was after: music, made manifest in prose.
— Sophia Nguyen, staff writer
***
“Many years later as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez (translated by Gregory Rabassa), is riddled with richly detailed and narratively complex sentences. This first one seems to encompass the whole life of one character while leaving part of that story untold. The line pairs the incredible with the mundane, setting the stage for a novel that popularized magical realism and inspired a generation of international writers by blending an imagined Latin American past with actual historical events.
Think of a murder board, that trope from crime television with the red string and pushpins connecting things together. Now imagine that an endless string connects everything, everywhere, real and fictional, possible and hopeless, backward and forward in time. And then visualize bunching that endless string together in your hand, connecting it all together at once. That is the sensation this first line delivers anew, every time I read it.
— Ian Bogost, staff writer
***
“The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living.”
The diction Stella Gibbons deploys at the start of her satirical 1932 novel, Cold Comfort Farm, is so precise that you could almost be forgiven for reading the sentence straight, although to do so would be to miss out on its humor: She is presenting a simulacrum of the genteel English novel but turning the values that sort of novel advances on their head. (To that end, Gibbons also includes a foreword in which she appeals for feedback from a pretentious fictional author called Anthony Pookworthy.) Flora’s education is presented as enviable but in fact sounds dreadful, in addition to ineffective at preparing her for anything but an ornamental life. And although the book revolves around her efforts to impart her impeccable social graces to a pack of depressive, half-feral relatives, it also makes relentless fun of her and her tactics, starting with her reluctant attraction to the sort of upper-crust chap who would name his personal airplane Speed Cop II.
— Talya Zax, senior editor
***
“For a long time I used to go to bed early.”
The first words of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time call us to attention like an orchestra tuning before a symphony—and from this simple confession, the elaborate, mannered world of Paris in the late Second Empire soon springs to life. In this seven-volume novel, Marcel, the narrator and the author’s surrogate, learns to navigate, and then transcend, social circles of ever greater wealth and status.
One of Proust’s possible titles for his masterpiece was The Intermittencies of the Heart, and his epic novel takes place on a startlingly intimate scale. The airy ordinariness of the opening sentence introduces a mind seized by obsessive self-scrutiny and exquisite perceptions of art, music, memory, love, and grief. The painstaking details of Marcel’s inner life make this million-plus-word book still feel like the radical experiment it was in 1913, when the first volume was published. No one bares the soul like Proust, and for a long time, his anatomy of sexual jealousy, infatuation, and heartbreak has kept me up quite late.
— Walt Hunter, contributing editor
***
“The notice informed them that it was a temporary matter: for five days their electricity would be cut off for one hour, beginning at 8 p.m.”
This line, from the first story in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize–winning short-story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, is astonishing in its ability to do so much narrative work in only 26 words. Immediately, as a reader, you are left wondering about the notice, who sent it, and why the electricity is getting cut off. You feel compelled to keep reading, to answer these questions, and to encounter new ones. Once you reach the end of the story—which is packed with a remarkable number of emotional turns in just 21 pages—the meaning of “temporary matter” takes on a new and devastating shape. Lahiri is singular in her ability to write characters enmeshed in melancholy, folded into a propulsive narrative. An incredible story in an incredible book.
— Clint Smith, staff writer
***
“Maybe it was that Cyrus had done the wrong drugs in the right order, or the right drugs in the wrong order, but when God finally spoke back to him after twenty-seven years of silence, what Cyrus wanted more than anything else was a do-over.”
Who, after reading this sentence, can resist wanting to know more about Cyrus’s plight? This opening line from Martyr!, Kaveh Akbar’s 2024 debut novel, is funny and dense with mystery and surprise (where has God been for 27 years? Is God really speaking, or is “God” just a neurochemical epiphenomenon of those drugs?), and it ends on a powerful note of regret—regret being a winning quality in a first sentence. To begin this story about an Iranian American man’s experiences with addiction, faith, blasphemy, family, and martyrdom, Akbar stretches out a long sentence introducing a character who has steered his life into a dark place, landing with the down-stress on the colloquial do-over, the perfect note of anticlimax. Akbar, a poet, has an ear for rhythm, and his irresistible narrative voice hooks you from its first wry and delightful clauses, carrying you through to the many plot revelations ahead.
— Scott Stossel, national editor
The Week Ahead
- You Can See Everything, a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes in the weeks before she went to prison and the three years that followed (out Friday in limited theaters)
- Crystal Lake, a Friday the 13th prequel series about Pamela Voorhees before she becomes a killer (streaming Thursday on Peacock)
- You Let Me In, a novel by Lucy Clarke about a writer who suspects that someone is watching her in her own home (out Thursday)
Essay
A Striking Decline in Openness to IVF
By Faith Hill
Less than 50 years ago, the first child conceived by in vitro fertilization was delivered in Oldham, England. Louise Brown was heralded as a medical marvel—not only for her parents, who had struggled to conceive for a decade, but also for the world. “At 11:47 pm, on July 25th 1978,” the British paper The Observer declared, “hope was born.”
Thirteen million “test-tube babies” later, Brown is still too young to qualify for social-security benefits, and IVF has gone from science fiction to a household acronym. It accounts for almost one in 36 births in the United States, according to some estimates. In the meantime, another fertility treatment has become much more common: From 2014 to 2024, the number of egg-freezing procedures per year went from 6,000 to 39,000, a sixfold increase. By most obvious standards, the assisted-reproduction industry is thriving. It has allowed countless single people, same-sex partners, and couples dealing with infertility to become parents. It also happens to be worth tens of billions of dollars.
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- Gal Beckerman on why you should watch Fauda’s October 7 episodes
- Zoolander’s homme fatale
- “The year Anne Carson changed my life”
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Photo Album
At festivals and competitions in Spain, teams form spectacular human towers known as castells, a Catalan tradition dating to the late 18th century.
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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