Hand read Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren when it first came out in 1975, and it was a huge influence on her early works, such as Winterlong. In spring 2012, Hand visited Washington, DC, and saw her dear friend Rafael Sa’adah, who had an amazing surprise in store: one of the original manuscripts of Dhalgren, which he’d acquired from a book dealer. Hand says, “Raf unwrapped it for the first time and we went through it page by page. Like entering a literary Tutankhamun’s tomb.” Hand took many photos of the text, including this shot of the novel’s epigraph, which she has always loved. IN THE COURSE OF writing this novel, I referred to the research of many people, including the classic texts on Dionysos, Dionysus: Myth and Cult by Walter Otto and Carl Kerenyi’s Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life; as well as scholarly work in mythology and folklore by Alain Danielou, A.G. Ward, Eleanor Hull, E.O. James, Walter Burkert, Catherine Johns, Donald A. Mackenzie, J.D.S. Pendlebury, Arthur Evans, Walter Torbrugge, Ivar Lissner, Claude Levi-Strauss, and the redoubtable Jane Harrison. Most of all, I am indebted to the work of the Italian historian Carlo Ginsburg, whose books The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and Ecstacies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, first introduced me to the Benandanti and Malandanti. Any factual errors are, of course, my own.
The trial of Giulietta is adapted from the late sixteenth-century trials of Paolo Gasparutto and Battista Moduco, as recorded in The Night Battles and translated by John and Anne Tedeschi.
Some of the history of Kamensic Village was based on God’s Country: A History of Pound Ridge, New York, by Jay Harris, as well as material compiled and published by the Pound Ridge Historical Society and safely kept for lo! these many years, by my parents. Thanks, Mom and Dad. I drew as well on the memories of my friends Kathleen Hart, especially her poems about Whitlockville, the drowned village beneath the Mianus reservoir; and Anne Wittman, who twenty years ago worked with me at the Bedford Village Courthouse Museum (open weekends, Closed Today). However, anyone looking for the boundaries of Kamensic should keep in mind Melville’s warning: “It is not down on any map; true places never are.”
My heartfelt thanks to the usual suspects: Martha Millard, Caitlin Blasdell, Jim Rickard, Paul Witcover, Christopher Schelling, Richard Grant, and especially John Clute.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint excerpts from copyrighted material: “The Intervention of the Gods,” in The Complete Poems of Cavafy, copyright © 1961, renewed 1989 by Rae Dalven, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & Co.
copyright © 1999 by Elizabeth Hand
cover design by Angela Goddard
978-1-4532-7897-0
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