I’m consistently delighted and grateful that I get to work with Mark Doten, and I appreciate to no end his help on this unusual book. Most of all, I appreciate the willingness he and Soho Press continue to show for publishing and supporting innovative work. I’m not only grateful to them for giving my own work a home, but proud to be part of their larger effort.
Deep thanks to Patrick Blanchfield, Travis Just, Hilary Plum, Sharon Mesmer, Jake Siegel, and Martin Woessner for reading versions or pieces of this book and talking with me about them.
The inspirations and influences that provoked and inflected this novel are too numerous to list, but a few of the most important ones can and should be named: Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967); Tom Waits’s Bone Machine (1992); Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1993); Dave Lapham’s Stray Bullets series (1995–present); the work of Irish composer Jennifer Walshe (especially XXX_LIVE_NUDE_GIRLS!!! [2003] and Motel Abandon [2005]); Object Collection’s opera Problem Radical(s) (2009); Professor Tamsen Wolff’s course on the twentieth-century American musical, for which I was lucky enough to be a teaching assistant while at Princeton; the music of Tyrants; and Daniel Fish’s revisionist 2015 production of Oklahoma! Similarly, detailing all the books, films, songs, and disjecta membra folded into this novel as research, discursive texture, and raw material for collage would be a thankless and tedious task, but a handful of the most important sources should be cited, including William Allen, Starkweather: Inside the Mind of a Teenage Killer, Clerisy Press, 2004; Ninette Beaver, B. K. Ripley, and Patrick Trese, Caril, Lipincott, 1974; Jeff O’Donnell, Starkweather: A Story of Mass Murder on the Great Plains, J&L Lee, 1993; Julia Adeney Thomas, “History and Biology in the Anthropocene: Problems of Scale, Problems of Value,” American Historical Review, 119:5 (December 1, 2014), 1587–1607; and Walt Whitman, “Starting from Paumanok,” from Leaves of Grass, 1881.
I would also like to offer my gratitude to the Lannan Foundation and the University of Notre Dame for their material support in making this work possible.
At last, for Sara, my first, best reader, my perennial road-trip companion, my life and breath, and for Reyzl, who has made the old roads new and strange again, who brightens the gloomy horizon with joy—thank you.