My wife and best friend, Lisa Remedios, and our two crazy daughters, Cadence Tomlinson and Laurel Tomlinson.
Eleanor Jackson, Ben LeRoy, Alan Rinzler.
Josh Jefferson, Gary Peterson.
Mel Freilicher, Austin Sarat, Rilla Askew, Matthew Hefti, Dave White, Matthew Dicks, Joe Milazzo, Eddie Sutton and family.
The Peripatetic Old East Dallas Book Club: Laura Freeland, Kelly Gordon, Lisa Remedios, Caroline Terry, Stephanie Woolley.
The Tomlinson Family: Bob, Sandi, Steven, Carol, Phil, Larry, Sid, Tracy Kienitz, Christy Doering.
Christopher Hill, Steve Freeland, Christopher Dvorak, Arthur Remedios, Janet “Query Shark” Reid, Mary Bisbee-Beek, Bethany Carland-Adams, Kate Petrella, Ashley Myers.
Phil Jackson’s Sacred Hoops and Bill Bradley’s Life on the Run taught me about basketball and the wider world in which it is played.
Both the novel’s structure and Caroline Amos’s speech patterns were influenced by Tom Mould’s excellent Choctaw Prophecy.
Austin Sarat’s insightful When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition opened my eyes to the moral contradictions inherent in the administration of the death penalty in this country, and inspired Aura’s victim impact testimony.
Al Franken’s Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations was essential to understanding how politicians and the media manipulate language to shape public opinion.
Jeffrey Toobin’s The Run of His Life was instrumental in getting a sense for how the O.J. Simpson trial unfolded over time, and for illuminating how race was a complicating factor for both sides, often in ways you wouldn’t expect.
Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk taught me how to convey the sensory overload of a live sporting event, and inspired the word cloud in Chapter 48.
Don DeLillo’s Underworld showed me how the techniques of film-making—establishing shots, cross-cutting, ellipsis—can be applied to literature. Its opening section contains the best sports writing I’ve had the pleasure to read, and the first scenes of my novel owe a heavy debt to Mr. DeLillo’s.