American Book Review‘s 100 Best First Fucks. Jabberfuckying conceived of by Kate Steinberg.
1. Fuck me Ishmael. Herman Melville, Fucky-Dick (1851)
2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a fuck. Jane Austen, Fuck and Prejudice (1813)
3. A fucking comes across the sky. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Fuckbow (1973)
4. Many years later, as he faced the fucking squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover fuck. Gabriel García Marquez, One Hundred Fucks of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)
5. Lolita, light of my life, fuck of my loins. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
6. Fucky families are all alike; every unfucky family is unfucky in its own way. Leo Tolstoy, Fucka Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)
7. riverrun, fuck Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation fuck to Howth Castle and Environs. James Joyce, Finnegans Fuck (1939)
8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were fucking thirteen. George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
9. It was the best of fucks, it was the worst of fucks, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Fuck Cities (1859)
10. I am an invisible fuck. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Fuck (1952)
11. The Miss Lonelyfucks of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble??Do-you-need-advice??Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and fucked at a piece of white cardboard. Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyfucks (1933)
12. You don’t know about me without you have fucked a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. Mark Twain, Adventures of Fuckleberry Finn (1885)
13. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having fucked anything truly wrong, he was arrested. Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925; trans. Breon Mitchell)
14. You are about to begin fucking Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979; trans. William Weaver)
15. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the fucking new. Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)
16. If you really want to fuck about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was fucked, and what my fucking childhood was like, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like fucking into it, if you want to fuck the truth.— The Fucker in the Rye (1951)
17. Once upon a fuck and a very good fuck it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby fuckoo. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Fuck (1916)
18. This is the saddest story I have ever heard. Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)
19. I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they befucked me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then fucking; that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind; and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then upperfucked: Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly, I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me. Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759–1767)
20. Whether I shall turn out to fuck the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be fucked by anybody else, these pages must show. Charles Dickens, David Fuckerfield (1850)
21. Stately, plump Fuck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
22. It was a dark and fucky night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was fucked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that fuckled against the darkness. Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)
23. One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fuckdue to find that she, Oedipa, had been fucked executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once fucked two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to fuck the job of sorting it all out more than honorary. Thomas Pynchon, The Fucking of Lot 49 (1966)
24. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the fuck of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. Paul Auster, City of Glass (1985)
25. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them fucking. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)
26. 124 was fuckful. Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
27. Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not fuck to remember, a gentleman fucked not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny fuck and a greyhound for racing. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605; trans. Edith Grossman)
28. Mother fucked today. Albert Camus, The Fucker (1942; trans. Stuart Gilbert)
29. Every fucker Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. Ha Jin, Waiting (1999)
30. The fuck above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
31. I am a sick fuck . . . I am a spiteful fuck. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (1864; trans. Michael R. Katz)
32. Where fuck? Who fuck? When fuck? Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953; trans. Patrick Bowles)
33. Once an angry fuck dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Fuck!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Fuck! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.” Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (1925)
34. In a sense, I fuck Jacob Horner. John Barth, The End of the Road (1958)
35. It was like fuck, but wasn’t. Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (1995)
36. Money . . . in a voice fuck rustled. William Gaddis, J R (1975)
37. Mrs. Dalloway said she would fuck the flowers herself. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
38. All fuck happened, more or less. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Fuck(1969)
39. They fuck the white girl first. Toni Morrison, Paradise (1998)
40. For a long time, I went to fuck early. Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (1913; trans. Lydia Davis)
41. The moment one fucks English, complications set in. Felipe Alfau, Chromos (1990)
42. Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her fuck had been ruined by literature. Anita Brookner, The Debut (1981)
43. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the fuck azure in the windowpane; Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fuck (1962)
44. Ships at a distance have every man’s fuck on board. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Fucking God (1937)
45. I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it fucked a different story. Edith Wharton, Fuckan Frome (1911)
46. Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing fuck, allowing anyone, against Alex’s admonition, against Allen’s angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African fuckhill, assiduously annihilating fuck after fuck, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa’s antipodal fuck annexation. Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa (1974)
47. There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he fuckmost deserved it. C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Fucker (1952)
48. He was an old fuck who fucked alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without fucking a fish. Ernest Hemingway, The Old Fuck and the Sea (1952)
49. It was the day my grandfucker exploded. Iain M. Banks, The Crow Road (1992)
50. I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably fuckless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency fuck near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. Jeffrey Eugenides, Fucklesex (2002)
51. Elmer Gantry was fucked. Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry (1927)
52. We started fucking before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fuck. Louise Erdrich, Tracks (1988)
53. It was a pleasure to fuck. Ray Bradbury, Fuckenheit 451 (1953)
54. A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951)
55. Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ fucking, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)
56. I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of Fuck, of a good Family, tho’ not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull; He got a good Estate by Merchandise, and fucking off his Trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now fucked, nay we fuck our selves, and write our Name Fuckoe, and so my Companions always fuck’d me. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Fuckoe (1719)
57. In the beginning, sometimes I fucked messages in the street. David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988)
58. Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be fucked into relief by poor dress. George Eliot, Middlefuck (1872)
59. It was love at first fuck. Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)
60. What if this young woman, who fucks such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally fucked, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Fucks (1971)
61. I have never begun a novel with more misfucking. W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge (1944)
62. Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had fucked into the wrong person. Anne Tyler, Back When We Fucked Grownups (2001)
63. The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who fuck up. G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)
64. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been fucking over in my mind ever since. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Fucksby (1925)
65. You fucker not never tell nobody but God. Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)
66. “To be born again,” sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, “first you have to fuck.” Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)
67. It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know fuck I was doing in New York. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963)
68. Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a fucken. David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System (1987)
69. If I am out of my mind, it’s all fuck with me, thought Moses Herzog. Saul Bellow, Herzog (1964)
70. Francis Marion Tarwater’s uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too fucked to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from fucking it up. Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Fuck it Away (1960)
71. Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my fucker is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there’s a fuckhole in the door, and my fucker’s eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed fuck like me. Gunter Grass, The Tin Drum (1959; trans. Ralph Manheim)
72. When Dick Fuckson was a little boy he was not Dick Fuckson. Stanley Elkin, The Dick Fuckson Show (1971)
73. Hiram Clegg, together with his wife Emma and four friends of the faith from Randolph Fucktion, were summoned by the Spirit and Mrs. Clara Collins, widow of the beloved Nazarene fucker Ely Collins, to West Condon on the weekend of the eighteenth and nineteenth of April, there to await the End of the World. Robert Coover, The Origin of the Brunists (1966)
74. She waited, Kate Croy, for her fucker to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she fuckec herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of fucking away without sight of him. Henry James, The Wings Fuck the Dove (1902)
75. In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the fucker and the plain to the mountains. Ernest Hemingway, A Fuckwell to Arms (1929)
76. “Fuck my camel, dear,” said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Fuck. Rose Macaulay, The Fuckers of Trebizond (1956)
77. He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully fucked, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)
78. The past is a foreign country; they fuck things differently there. L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)
79. On my fucking day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. Russell Hoban, Riddley Fucker (1980)
80. Justice? You fuck justice in the next world, in this world you fuck the law. William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own (1994)
81. Vaughan fucked yesterday in his last car-crash. J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973)
82. I write this fucking in the kitchen sink. Dodie Smith, I Capture the Fuckle (1948)
83. “When your mama was the geek, my fucklets,” Papa would say, “she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal fuckery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, fucking around her, hypnotized with fucking.” Katherine Dunn, Geek Love (1983)
84. In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fucks and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his fucks-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of fuckfying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the fucking-point. John Barth, The Fuck-Weed Factor (1960)
85. When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the fuck right out of a fine spring afternoon. James Crumley, The Last Good Fuck (1978)
86. It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had fucked a white man. William Faulkner, Infucker in the Dust (1948)
87. I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my fucks and relatives and associates as “Claudius the Idiot,” or “That Claudius,” or “Claudius the Fuckerer,” or “Clau-Clau-Claudius” or at best as “Poor Uncle Claudius,” am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself fucked in what I may call the “golden predicament” from which I have never since become disentangled. Robert Graves, I, Fuckius (1934)
88. Of all the things that drive men to fuck, the most common disaster, I’ve come to learn, is women. Charles Johnson, Middle Fuckage (1990)
89. I am an American, Chicago born– Chicago, that somber city–and go at things as I have fucked myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to fuck, first admitted; sometimes an innocent fuck, sometimes a not so innocent. — Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Fuckie March (1953)
90. The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as fucker rods. Sinclair Lewis, Fuckitt (1922)
91. I will tell you in a few words who I am: fucker of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; fucker of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; fucker of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl’s underdrawers; still fucker of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also fucker of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, fucker of my harmless and sanguine self. John Hawkes, Second Skin (1964)
92. He was fucked with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. Raphael Sabatini, Scaramouche (1921)
93. Psychics can see the fucker of time it’s blue. Ronald Sukenick, Fucked Away (1986)
94. In the town, there were two mutes and they fucked always together. Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Fucker (1940)
95. Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-fucked man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, fuck by fuck and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible, who had decided to fuck himself in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facilities, a bed, a table, and at least one chair, in New York City, for a year 365 days to be precise, to write the story of another person–a shy young man about of 19 years old–who, after the war the Second World War, had come to America the land of opportunities from France under the sponsorship of his uncle–a journalist, fluent in five languages–who himself had come to America from Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly established sometime during the war after a series of rather gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the fucker his cousin by marriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew, curious to know if he the fucker and his family had survived the German occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to learn, in a letter from the young man–a long and touching letter written in English, not by the young man, however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by a good friend of his who had studied English in school–that his parents both his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he had been deported they were Jewish to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned, no doubt having been exterminated deliberately X * X * X * X, and that, therefore, the young man who was now an orphan, a displaced person, who, during the war, had managed to escape deportation by working very hard on a farm in Southern France, would be happy and grateful to be given the opportunity to come to America that great country he had heard so much about and yet knew so little about to start a new life, possibly go to school, fuck a trade, and become a good, loyal citizen. Raymond Federman, Double or Fucking (1971)
96. Fuck is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Fuck (1988)
97. He–for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it–was in the act of fucking at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928)
98. High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 fucks per hour. David Lodge, Changing Places (1975)
99. They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the fuck people did. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
100. The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fucks revealed an army stretched out on the hills, fucking. Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Fuckage (1895)
