Brooklyn Magazine polled some editors, writers, and readers about their favorite sentences of the year. Like this one from Andrew Martin, Brooklyn contributor and freelance writer:
Sentence: “About a week after Danny’d put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger and a couple days after his lame orthodox funeral at our childhood church, I went for a walk along a street of patched potholes that runs along Lake Union (near where, a year or so in the future, a future I was sure had ended tragically the night Danny shot himself, my other brother Mike would pull a similar stunt, jumping off the Aurora Bridge and living to tell about it, thus revealing to me the comic, the vaudevillian underside of suicide) and saw a scavenging crow jabbing its beak into the underside of an injured robin.”
Where it’s from: The essay “Salinger and Sobs” in Charles D’Ambrosio’s collection of new and collected essays, Loitering.
Why it’s great: D’Ambrosio is a master short story writer, and his essays, long out of print and/or scattered to the winds, are, it turns out, very good as well, in no small part thanks to off-kilter, mind-jarring sentences like the one above, which summarizes many of the concerns (family, suicide, um, glibness) that haunt this troubling, excellent collection.
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