Go More on Each Gallon

There’s a special kind of torture in writing novels. It is, of course, The Beginning. Twitter threads and the conferences and podcasts insist, at decibels that seem to increase as quickly as the number of titles on shelves, that if you cannot capture a reader in the first 250/150/50 words, you are finished as a writer and possibly as a human being.

Ben Purkert did it in 41 words. I break our style rule and tell you this with a digit because its impossibility feels so much more legible that way (surely, it must be impossible? But I counted myself, with my finger.) I tell you this here — I begin in awe at his beginning — because I stopped, delighted. I kept going (who wouldn’t?) and read the rollicking whole of the The Men Can’t Be Saved, Purkert’s first novel, and then I wentmeGuernicaGuernica