Xhenet Aliu: Brass

To my supereditor, Andrea Walker, for her advocacy and enthusiasm from the very beginning, for laughing in the right places, for gently pointing out the wrong places, and for hopefully sporting a Hartford Whalers beanie. The publicity and marketing superstars who got this book into so many hands deserve more drinks than I could possibly ply them with: Jennifer Garza, Andrea DeWerd, Avideh Bashirrad, and Emma Thomasch. Thanks also to many others on the Random House team, including Andy Ward, Susan Kamil, Leigh Marchant, Emma Caruso, Jennifer Rodriguez, Toni Hetzel, and many others working behind the scenes whose names I wish I knew. Further props to Nicole Cunningham at The Book Group for keeping this machine well-oiled.

To a few critical early readers, who also happen to be dear friends and brilliant stars themselves, and whose input and insights helped this manuscript find its way from desktop clutter to real-life book: Jennine Capó Crucet, Gwendolyn Knapp, and Christopher Rhodes. Your suggestions were invaluable and you were far nicer about them than you had to be.

Big thanks to the Djerassi Resident Artists Program for providing shelter, food, a surrogate dog, and the company of damn cool humans during a critical revision period. Particular shout-out to Lunch Club and Barn Burn members Mark Conway, Brittany Powell, Chris Robinson, and Susanna Sonnenberg. Everything I’ve written since 2008 owes its existence in some way to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, where I met so many people I wanted to impress that I had no choice but to become a better writer and sharper dresser. Thanks to the faculty and students in the creative writing department at UNCW, where the characters of Elsie and Bashkim were first born.

Many, many other friends provided inspiration, support, respite, fantastically inappropriate jokes, meals, beds on which to crash, and a reason to keep going, among them Patricia Engel, Ru Freeman, Susan McCarty, Matt Kirkpatrick, Dawn Lonsinger, Jacob Paul, Esther Lee, Davy Gibbs, Lauren Knowlton, Jessie and Thomas Wilcox, Bob Glass, Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes, Jason Labbe, Steve May, Tim Parrish, and others whom I’m being an idiot for not thinking of as I write this. The fact that there are enough amazing people in my life for me to not be able to come up with all of their names in one sitting is something for which I’m profoundly grateful.

To Timothy O’Keefe: thank you for letting me work and making me want to. Thank you for the noise that comes between the quiet. Thank you for the manhattans, the pad see ew, for walking the dogs, and for not getting mad when I ask you if you’ve done the things around the house that of course you’ve already done. Thanks to the rest of the O’Keefe family both for making someone like Tim and for being as gracious, generous, and kind as you are.

Finally, I owe the biggest debt to Mom, Chuck, Kyjtim, Michael, Sarah, Kim, and Kristen (and now their spouses and kiddos). We may not all share the same blood, but we shared things that I think made us even more of a family: a single bathroom for the eight of us and a fleet of Dodge K-cars. You taught me how to laugh at adversity and just about everything else. Without you, I wouldn’t have bothered with any of this.

XHENET ALIU’s debut fiction collection, Domesticated Wild Things, and Other Stories, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in Glimmer Train, The Barcelona Review, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington and an MLIS from The University of Alabama. A native of Waterbury, Connecticut, she was born to an Albanian father and a Lithuanian American mother. She now lives in Athens, Georgia, and works as an academic librarian.

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