Friday, October 2, 2009

Post MFA Quiz!

Name the novels that belong to these first sentences:

When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.

Here is an account of Quoyle, born in Brooklyn and raised in a shuffle of dreary upstate towns.

Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

“Where’s Pa going with that ax?” said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.

Amerigo Bonasera sat in New York Criminal Court Number 3 and waited for justice, vengeance on the men who had so cruelly hurt his daughter, who had tried to dishonor her.

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.

Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tide-water dog, strong muscled and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego.

Six months before Polly Cain drowned in the canal, my sister, Nona, ran off with a cowboy.

I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice – not because of the voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of ________.

4 comments:

Anna said...

I got Anna Karenina, The Bell Jar and Owen Meany.

MFA, you have failed me.

Travis Fortney said...

Wind up Bird Chronicles, Blind Assassin, God of Animals? Otherwise, I'm at a loss.

kimberly lambright said...

1) wind-up bird chronicle (awesome awesome)
2) shipping news
3) the blind assassin
4) anna karenina
5) 100 years of solitude
6) charlotte's web??
7) noooooo idea
8) bell jar
9) call of the wild
10) the god of animals
11) ??

I'm really impressed with myself.

Kelly Kathleen Ferguson said...

wow, kimberly. if i had a prize i would award it. i bestow you a cyberprize of [huzzah!] the only missing answer is the godfather.