One of the Best First Sentences in Modern Literature

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Honor Jones, a senior editor who has written about divorce, motherhood, and John le Carré. She has also published short stories in this magazine, including “Skin a Rabbit,” which was excerpted from her novel, Sleep. Honor recommends punctuating a workday with art and croissants, reading anything by Lauren Groff, and assigning vibes-based ratings to pictures of horses.— Stephanie Bai, senior associate editorSomething delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: Because this is Mother’s Day weekend I’m answering this one first. One of my kids discovered the Netflix movie Nimona, and I don’t think enough people know how great this movie is. It’s got a spunky heroine, two knights in love, and smart things to say about how authoritarians exploit fear. And for my 6-year-old: fight scenes with a rhinoceros.An author I will read anything by: There are many, but one is Lauren Groff. While on a hike with two Atlantic colleagues this spring, I made them listen to me recount in detail the entire plot of “Between the Shadow and the Soul”—one of the stories in Groff’s new collection, Brawler. I feel bad because now they can never come to the story fresh, and because I went on for a really long time and they were trapped on a nature trail and couldn’t escape. So I’ll be briefer here: Groff commands the passage of time brilliantly, your understanding of the characters’ relationship changes right up until the very end, and the story is so sad. Groff has also written one of my favorite openings in all of recent literature, for her novel Matrix: “She rides out of the forest alone. Seventeen years old, in the cold March drizzle, Marie