A few weeks ago, my ex-colleague, Boris Kachka, wrote that Frederic Beigbeder's Windows on the World had the year's best first sentence in a novel: “You know how it ends: Everybody dies.”
Because the title of my novel is AND THEY ALL DIE IN THE END, I'm collecting references that remind me of it, for some yet unspecified purpose. (Know of any? Email me at espiers AT earthlink dot net.)
I just ran across another last night, while reading Julian Barnes' Love, Etc.:
Stuart: I read more than I used to. Non-fiction. History, science, biography. I like to know that what I'm being told is true. From time to time I'll read a novel, if there's one people are going on about. But stories aren't enough like life for me. In stories, someone gets married and that's the ending—well, I can tell you from my own personal experience that this isn't the case. In life, every ending is just the start of another story. Except when you die—that's an ending that's really an ending. I suppose if novels were true to life, they'd all end with the characters dying,, but if they did, we wouldn't want to read them, would we?
From today's edition of Page Six:
January 25, 2006 -- ORIGINAL Gawker editrix Elizabeth Spiers is hoping to give her old employer a much-needed run for its money. Spiers will launch dealbreaker.com, a Wall Street gossip blog, in March. If it's successful, look for Spiers to spin off sister sites just like Gawker Media boss Nick Denton did. The Alabama native, who quit her last job as editor-in-chief of mediabisto.com to finish her novel, "And They All Die in the End" (out next year from Simon & Schuster), has some unlikely inspiration in her new digs at lead investor Carter Burden's TriBeCa offices: an oil painting of former Journey frontman Steve Perry with the caption, "To Protect and to Rock."
UPDATE: Per Gawker's post here**,
I realize that actual reporting is Kryptonite to Gawker and that calling me for comment or asking me questions using my totally accessible email/IM/and-or-cell phone number would be historically unprecedented (having never done it before), cause space and time to collapse, pulverize us all in a single blast of plasma energy, etc., BUT...
Justin B. Smith is one of my investors (and one whose name Jesse should recognize.) We bought the domain off of someone else, thus the five year holding date.
If you'd have asked, I'd have told you.
I'm just saying.
** < Stewie > someone's feeling a leeeeeetttle threatened, hmmm? < / Stewie>