Books Blog: English Literature & Linguistics

The results of the 2008 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest are in, and they are spectacular! The grand prize went to Garrison Spik of Washington, D.C. for this bit of prose:

Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped “Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J.”

Other beauties include Shannon Wedge of New Hampshire who won in the Adventure category:

Leopold looked up at the arrow piercing the skin of the dirigible with a sort of wondrous dismay — the wheezy shriek was just the sort of sound he always imagined a baby moose being beaten with a pair of accordions might make.

As well as Graham Thomas of St Albans, Hertfordshire, U.K. who ran up the Purple Prose:

The complementary crepuscularities of earth and sky shrank away from one another as the roseate effulgence of a new dawn burst forth, not unlike a reclining pneumatic beauty’s black silk stocking splitting apart at the seam to reveal the glowing radiance of an angrily sun-burned leg.

I randomly came across Book Rental Fail on the Failblog, which struck me as hilarious and sad at the same time:

Name: Selekta
Posts: 913

Was just thinking. My sister does a lot of reading, and spends like $1000 a year just on books alone. Most of them she reads once then never looks at again. Is there any kind of like video rental store … but for books? Would make things a lot cheap, plus once one person has read one the next person can get enjoyment from it etc.

We do have such a thing; it’s called a Library!!

We came across this in the grand canyon Hualapai area, a lovely example of an English sentence completely lacking a verb, but still understandable by native speakers. Or, it might be an imperative to service the other door… we’ll leave it up to you to decide.

“This is America, and our only lanaguage is English,” says this van.