Thank you to my editors, Maya Ziv and Stephanie Meyers, and the entire crew at Harper Perennial (Cal Morgan, Erica Barmash, Gregory Henry, Julie Hersh, Fritz Metsch, Amy Baker, et al.). Without you, there would be no book.
Thank you to my agent, Brandi Bowles, and her colleagues at Foundry Literary + Media.
Thank you to all of the bookstores, libraries, writer’s conferences, and burlesque theaters that hosted me on my Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love book tour, including: BookCourt, Greenlight, and Word in Brooklyn; the Naked Girls Reading crew worldwide, including Michelle L’amour, Franky Vivid, Naked Girls Reading Chicago, Naked Girls Reading NYC, and the Boston Baby Dolls; Lady Jane’s Salon at Madame X in Manhattan; RT Booklovers Convention; the Book Blogger Convention; RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth, New Hampshire; Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia; BookExpo America; and the Metro Library Network’s Out Loud Author Series in Iowa.
Thank you to my parents for their support over the years. My mother: “What’s your book about?” Me: “Writers who drink and generally misbehave.” Her: “So it’s about you?”
Thank you to my beta readers (listed by Twitter handles): @tiffanyreisz, @wellreadwife, @mrstomsauter, @j_hussein, @henningland, @hockeyvamp, @carathebruce, @edieharris, @cortney_writes, @write_by_night, @alyslinn, @juniperjenny, @annabelleblume, @karenbbooth, @muchadoabout77, and @fishwithsticks.
Thank you to the following writers who discussed Literary Rogues with me in some form or another: James Frey, Elizabeth Wurtzel, J. Michael Lennon, Eric Olsen, Glenn Schaeffer, Joe Haldeman, Daniel Friedman, Sean Ferrell, Benjamin Hale, Alexander Chee, and Marvin Bell.
Thank you to T. C. Boyle. While I was finishing the book, I ran into T. C. Boyle in Iowa City during the 75th Writer’s Workshop reunion. He’s intelligent, charming, eccentric, and a little bit goofy—in other words, a lot like a T. C. Boyle novel. After I told him about Literary Rogues, he rattled off the passage from his short story “Greasy Lake” that now appears as the book’s epigraph. Entirely from memory.
Thank you to David McClay, senior curator of the John Murray Archive at the National Library of Scotland, and Virginia Murray, for assisting me in tracking down the lost pubic hair of Lady Caroline Lamb. Alas, it was a fool’s quest...
And, last but not least, thank you to everyone who has followed my ramblings in past books, on Twitter, and elsewhere.