Category: book Nook
You can find all the winning entries here at:
http://www.sjsu.edu/depts/english/2006.htm
A retired mechanical designer for the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory is the winner of the 24th running of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. A resident of
the Sacramento suburb of Carmichael, Guigli displayed appalling powers of invention by submitting sixty entries to the 2006 Contest, including one that
has been "honored" in the Historical Fiction Category. "My motivation for entering the contest," he confesses, "was to find a constructive outlet for my
dementia."
An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton
(1803-1873). The goal of the contest is the essence of simplicity: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Although
best known for "The Last Days of Pompeii" (1834), which has been made into a movie three times, originating the expression "the pen is mightier than the
sword," and phrases like "the great unwashed" and "pursuit of the almighty dollar," Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal
words that the "Peanuts" beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, "It was a dark and stormy night."
The contest began in 1982 as a quiet campus affair, attracting only three submissions. This response being a thunderous success by academic standards, the
contest went public the following year and ever since has annually attracted thousands of entries from all over the world.
While the Winner parodies hard-boiled detective fiction, the runner-up toys with perhaps the most famous piece of dialogue from Clint Eastwood's "Dirty
Harry" movie. In keeping with the bignitude and high seriousness of the Contest, the Grand Prize winner will receive a pittance. Other winners must content
themselves with becoming household names.
The winner's submission:
Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a
woman whose body said you've had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave
and lick the shovel clean.
Jim Guigli
Carmichael, CA
Runner-Up
"I know what you're thinking, punk," hissed Wordy Harry to his new editor, "you're thinking, 'Did he use six superfluous adjectives or only five?' - and
to tell the truth, I forgot myself in all this excitement; but being as this is English, the most powerful language in the world, whose subtle nuances
will blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel loquacious?' - well do you, punk?"
Stuart Vasepuru
Edinburgh, Scotland
Check it out, there are some halarious ones. Check out the puns and the romance sections.
Bob