Dear readers, I’m spiraling! This week I set out to recommend great literary openers, because I have a nerdy passion for books that grab you from the start. What I failed to realize, however, is that selecting this topic means I have to write a good intro about good intros. Why do I do this to myself? To stay sane, I’ll keep it brief. My favorite intros wow you with a remarkable voice. They cleverly establish a sensibility. They don’t just set the stage for the rest of the book but, without feeling too obvious, find ways to surprise and delight in their own right. There are a lot of great literary openings, but here are two that I particularly love. —MJ “Annihilation,” by Jeff VanderMeerFiction, 2014
VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series, which begins with “Annihilation,” follows a team of explorers venturing into the mysterious Area X — a strange, seemingly otherworldly zone discovered decades ago on a coastal region of Earth. Our present team is the 12th to venture there, and the few people who have managed to return from previous expeditions all died shortly thereafter. Unfortunately for humanity, Area X is expanding. The series unleashes a thrilling fantasia of science fiction and horror, but all you really need to know about its tone and approach is captured in the first sentence of “Annihilation”: The tower, which was not supposed to be there, plunges into the earth in a place just before the black pine forest begins to give way to swamp and then the reeds and wind-gnarled trees of the marsh flats. Seven words in this opening made me sit right up: “Which was not supposed to be there.” A quiet subordinate clause that injects immediate tension — the tower is not supposed to be there, and yet there it is! Color me intrigued! How do we know it’s not supposed to be there? There where? Should it exist somewhere else or should it not exist at all? (An eighth word, the verb “plunges,” incidentally also intrigues. Don’t towers, well, tower? They rise into the sky, they don’t plunge into the earth.) I picked up “Annihilation” in 2018, around the time that Alex Garland’s film adaptation came out, but nearly a decade later the opening still holds me rapt. I can’t help marveling at how, in just a few words, VanderMeer supercharges his series with a sense of wrongness and dread. Read if you like: “The Haunting of Hill House,” by Shirley Jackson (speaking of fantastic openings); “Fever Dream,” by Samanta Schweblin. “Homie,” by Danez SmithPoetry, 2020
It’s impressive to entice readers with an opening line. But Smith (who uses they/them pronouns) does one better in this poetry collection — they charmed me with the title pages alone. Let me explain. You pick up Smith’s book. On the cover you see the title, “Homie,” emblazoned in neon pink bubble letters on a neon yellow cover. You flip it open and see a page with the title again: “Homie.” Flip again and you get the copyright page. OK, so far, so normal. But then the next page has a “note on the title” — curious! — explaining that the collection is titled “Homie” only to prevent non-Black people from saying its real name, which evokes the N-word. Flip again, and at last you get a new title page that proudly displays the true but forbidden title. Readers, I gasped. And then I burst out laughing. It’s the poetry equivalent of a “Saturday Night Live” cold open. Before the book even properly begins, Smith is giving us jokes, provocations, personality. That spirit echoes throughout the poems that make up the collection. In “dogs!,” for instance, Smith offers jocular canine-related vignettes, drawing on sources from “Scooby Doo” to a neighbor’s pooch who won’t shut up. Then the playfulness gives way to more devastating reflections: a dead dog is a hero, a dead lion This duality is why I love “Homie” — somehow the book is both laugh-out-loud funny and soberingly poignant. And our first clue to it all is hiding right there in the title pages. Read if you like: “Erasure,” by Percival Everett; the wonderful chaos that was Black Twitter. We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. Friendly reminder: Check your local library for books! Many libraries allow you to reserve copies online. Like this email? Sign-up here or forward it to your friends. Have a suggestion or two on how we can improve it? Let us know at books@nytimes.com. Plunge further into books at The New York Times or our reading recommendations.
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