At the end of June, author Molly Ringle (pictured, via) won the 2010 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, writing the world’s worst opening sentence to an imaginary novel. The contest was named after Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, who wrote the line: “It was a dark and stormy night.”

Welcome to our Top Stories of Summer 2010 series. For all our readers returning from summer homes and Caribbean yacht trips, we’ve created a short list of the 15 stories you may have missed during this long, strange summer for the publishing industry.

Here is the award winning sentence: “For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss–a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil.”