Thank you to my mom, for giving me my love of reading, and kindling my writing spark from the time I was tiny. Thank you to Lonnie, for being so generous with stories about your time doing factory work, which impacted this manuscript in huge ways. Thank you to my sister Sarah for playing make believe with me when we were little kids, which continues to inform my daydreaming process. Thank you to friends and mentors who’ve taught me an enormous amount about the interconnected processes that make the world, and about myself, and about art, in big and small ways, non-exhaustively including Hilary, Bill, Zach, Jenny, Jeremy, Sara, Steve, Denise, Zara, Patrick, Sneha, Thomas, Benji, Jesse, Sadie, Emily, Alexx, Ada, Sarah, Alex, another Alex, Tamara, Amanda, Asya, Viengsamai, cris, Raphael, Humberto, Colin, Naseem, Riley, DaJona, Margaret, Anita, J., and here particularly Em, Caleb, and Theo, who were all early readers for this book: I’m better for knowing you. Thank you to Mothra. You are a very good kitty cat, and will never read this book.
Thank you to my lovely agent Kiki and the DMLA team, the wonderful Erewhon team credited below, and to the Kensington team, and whomever handles distribution on the PRH side, and the workers responsible for papermaking and printing and sorting and shipping and shelving and selling this book. Thank you to the IWW, you guys are so cool, and thank you to the Etruscan names for Greek heroes Wikipedia page, where I spent a lot of time contemplating the Veltuni names that appear in this book. In that, I’m very grateful for having studied Classics, as it’s proved pretty invaluable when it comes to thinking about national rhetoric and mythmaking. Likewise, I’m grateful for having been an insufferable Shakespeare nerd at an impressionable age, and learning by extension about how fun it is to play around with language.
Innumerable influences at play here, but a few theorists, authors, and individual stories stick out that I want to highlight specifically as being important to this book’s creation: Karl Marx, The End of Evangelion (1997), Dhalgren and Trouble on Triton by Samuel Delany, Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg, The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader ed. Joan Nestle, Georges Bataille, Frederic Jameson, Gilles Delueze, Disco Elysium (2019), Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, Slug and Other Stories by Megan Milks, Terminal Boredom: Stories by Izumi Suzuki, Emma Goldman, José Esteban Muñoz, Donna Haraway, Confessions of a Fox by Jordy Rosenberg, Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny, X by Davy Davis, Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer, Octavia Butler, Candy Darling, The Princess Bride (1987), The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, Jasbir K. Puar, Dennis Johnson, The Picture of Dorian Grey and The Soul of Man Under Socialism by Oscar Wilde, Tiqqun, Dimension 20’s A Crown of Candy, Sianne Ngai, Country of Ghosts by Margaret Killjoy, Make the Golf Course a Public Sex Forest!, Silvia Federici, Fourchambers, Sylvia Rivera, Kathy Acker, Aimé Césaire, Darko Suvin, James Baldwin, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions by Larry Kramer, The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson, Oil! by Upton Sinclair, Sara Ahmed, Jane Bennett, Psycho Nymph Exile by Porpentine, and, for better or worse, The Phenomenology of Spirit by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
Also, you. Thank you! Peace out.