American Book Review's "100 Best First Lines from Novels"

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The American Book Review, founded in 1977, is "an internationally circulated bimonthly print journal that specializes in reviews of frequently neglected published works of fiction, poetry, and literary criticism." In 2006, they chose what they thought were the 100 best first lines from novels. This is a list of those novels.

Pages: 1

  1. 1.
    Moby-Dick: or, The Whale (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
    by Herman Melville

  2. 2.
    Pride and Prejudice (Bantam Classics)
    by Jane Austen

  3. 3.
    Gravity's Rainbow
    by Thomas Pynchon

  4. 4.
    One Hundred Years of Solitude
    by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  5. 5.
    Lolita, 50th Anniversary Edition
    by Vladimir Nabokov

  6. 6.
    Anna Karenina
    by Leo Tolstoy

  7. 7.
    Finnegans Wake (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)
    by James Joyce

  8. 8.
    Nineteen Eighty-Four (Penguin Modern Classics)
    by George Orwell

  9. 9.
    A Tale of Two Cities (Penguin Classics)
    by Charles Dickens

  10. 10.
    Invisible Man
    by Ralph Ellison

  11. 11.
    ?
    Miss Lonelyhearts
    by Nathanael West

  12. 12.
    Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain Library)
    by Mark Twain

  13. 13.
    The Trial
    by Franz Kafka

  14. 14.
    If on a winter's night a traveler
    by Italo Calvino

  15. 15.
    Murphy (Beckett, Samuel)
    by Samuel Beckett

  16. 16.
    The Catcher in the Rye
    by J. D. Salinger

  17. 17.

  18. 18.
    The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion (Oxford World's Classics)
    by Ford Madox Ford

  19. 20.
    David Copperfield (Modern Library Classics)
    by Charles Dickens

  20. 21.
    Ulysses
    by James Joyce

  21. 22.
    Paul Clifford
    by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

  22. 23.
    The Crying of Lot 49
    by Thomas Pynchon

  23. 24.
    City of Glass (New York Trilogy)
    by Paul Auster

  24. 25.
    The Sound and the Fury: The Corrected Text
    by William Faulkner

  25. 26.
    Beloved
    by Toni Morrison

  26. 27.
    Don Quixote
    by Miguel De Cervantes

  27. 28.
    The Stranger
    by Albert Camus

  28. 29.
    Waiting
    by Ha Jin

  29. 30.
    Neuromancer
    by William Gibson

  30. 31.
    Notes from Underground (Vintage Classics)
    by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  31. 32.
    The Unnamable (Modern Classics)
    by Samuel Beckett

  32. 33.
    The Making of Americans (American Literature Series)
    by Gertrude Stein

  33. 34.
    The End of the Road
    by John Barth

  34. 35.
    Galatea 2.2: A Novel
    by Richard Powers

  35. 36.
    JR (a novel)
    by William Gaddis

  36. 37.
    Mrs. Dalloway
    by Virginia Woolf

  37. 38.
    Slaughterhouse-Five
    by Kurt Vonnegut

  38. 39.
    Paradise (Oprah's Book Club)
    by Toni Morrison

  39. 41.
    ?
    Chromos
    by Felipe Alfau

  40. 42.
    The Debut
    by Anita Brookner

  41. 43.
    Pale Fire
    by Vladimir Nabokov

  42. 44.
    Their Eyes Were Watching God
    by Zora Neale Hurston

  43. 45.
    Ethan Frome (Signet Classics)
    by Edith Wharton

  44. 46.
    Alphabetical Africa (New Directions Book)
    by Walter Abish

  45. 47.
    The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Narnia)
    by C. S. Lewis

  46. 48.
    The Old Man and the Sea
    by Ernest Hemingway

  47. 49.
    The Crow Road
    by Iain Banks

  48. 50.
    Middlesex: A Novel
    by Jeffrey Eugenides

Pages: 1

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Created by bah on May 02, 2007.
 

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