Can you spot the classic? Every day I will post three passages of fiction in English: one from a classic twentieth century novel or short story, and one each from fiction that is independently published, and traditionally published.
Your job is to decide which one is the classic.
UPDATE: Any comments correctly spoiling the answer with a title and author will be held until the commenting period is over. Whee!
This should be totally easy, right?
Okay, here we go. Three passages, all you need to do is choose the one from the classic twentieth century novel. You can also decide which one is the self-published, and which one is the contemporary trad published. Leave a comment to be entered into a drawing for an Amazon gift card.
And by the way, if you Google the answer, let me know. The point is to read and appreciate; getting it right is second.
Answers and commentary tomorrow.
#1 Flakes of white glimmered through the frost-blurred glass of the myriad windows of the Winter Palace of Lethe. In moments the snowflakes turned into armies. They piled and compounded, stretched and distended into geometric symmetry. Folding into garlands of impossible gauze veils, they appeared at last to be the faint and vaporous spinnings of a sky-sized ice spider casting its web on the world.
#2 The sun was warming the brush house, breaking through its crevices in long streaks. And one of the streaks fell on the box where Coyotito lay, and on the ropes that held it. It was a tiny movement that drew their eyes to the hanging box. Kino and Juana froze in their positions. Down the rope that held the baby's box from the roof support a scorpion moved slowly. His stinging tail was straight out behind him, but he could whip it up in a flash of time.
#3 On that hazy Saturday in late August, the warm breeeze smelled of cattails and seaweed, occasional gusts rustling the grove of pines to the left of the open yard. Heat rose in shimmery vapors from the sunbaked earth and cicadas buzzed in the long grass near the woods, a living thermometer that grew higher-pitched and more insistent with each rising degree.
Ah, John Steinbeck, The Pearl! 'Tis the middle one, but it ain't fair to middlin'.
I know too much about one of the others from a joke you made on FB. A good one, too.
Posted by: Lyn Fairchild Hawks | February 17, 2015 at 10:15 PM
Greetings from north India!
My guess is:
#1=self-published (on the slightly dubious grounds that the rather transparent Palace of Lethe=forgetfulness seems to me to signal sp)
#3=classic 20th century (I don't recognise any of the three so this is a not based on knowledge at all)
I'm also about half way through Gettysburg and enjoying it, but more of that on another occasion.
Posted by: Richard Abbott | February 17, 2015 at 10:39 PM
The reveal: #2 is from John Steinbeck's The Pearl. #1 is from Cobweb Bride by Vera Nazarian (self-pubbed), and #3 is from What She Left Behind by Ellen Marie Wiseman, one of Amazon's Best Books of 2014.
I love Steinbeck's ingenious use of light in this passage, almost cinematically highlighting the scorpion with the shaft of light that comes in from a hole in the hut.
Posted by: DWF | February 18, 2015 at 02:51 PM