It's time again for the results of the unusual annual fiction contest, sponsored by the English Department of an American university. (I do this every year.) Who can name the contest and give me the 2007 overall winner?

Ingold

Jim Gleeson, 47, of Madison, Wis., beat out thousands of other prose manglers in San Jose State University's 2007 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest with this convoluted opening sentence to a nonexistent novel:"Gerald began - but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten per cent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them 'permanently' meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash - to pee," Gleeson wrote. http://www.cbc.ca/cp/Oddities/070730/K073035AU.html Aug 05 07, 7:28 PM

lanfranco

Lovely, Ingold, you get a silver ballpoint pen, if they still make such a thing. Here's the official site. I actually prefer this year's Runner-Up, by Scott Palmer, which seems to me to have been composed in the true Bulwer-Lytton spirit: http://www.sjsu.edu/depts/english/2007.htm Aug 05 07, 7:34 PM