Tatar’s book speculates on why children—or anyone for that matter—would be attracted to the terrible violence found in the stories collected by the famous Grimm brothers. After some thumbing of my own, I began to wonder: What would the modern world look like if it had evolved directly out of the magical folktales of medieval Europe? Dust City, I suppose, is one possible answer.
Novels, however, are rarely written in dentists’ waiting rooms. As such, I’d like to acknowledge a debt of gratitude to all the people who helped along the way: my editor, Jessica Rothenberg, whose insightful feedback did wonders for shaping the story; Jennifer Notman, my editor here in Toronto, at Penguin Canada; my agent, Jackie Kaiser, her colleague, Natasha Daneman, and the wonderful folks at Westwood Creative Artists; Ben Schrank and the enthusiastic team at Razorbill/Penguin in New York; Natalie Sousa, whose cover designs are always beautiful and astonishing; my friends and family, who tolerate how often I vanish into meandering realms of reverie; and Mitch Kowalski, the earthquake aficionado who runs the Toronto Writers’ Centre, without which I would almost certainly never bang out a single word!
Finally, my thanks to Ralph Manheim, translator of Grimms’ Tales for Young and Old: The Complete Stories, which sat on my bookshelf as a reference text (and a source of inspiration) while I was writing. The Grimm Brothers’ epigraph at the beginning of Dust City is taken from the 1983 edition.
Table of Contents
Cover
Halftitle
Copyright
Title Page
Dedication
Part One St. Remus
1 Butterfly on Fire
2 Gravel and Honey
3 Nothing to be afraid of
4 Better Living Through Enchantment
5 Bubble of Mud
7 Fresh Scabs
8 Blood Memory of the Species
9 Appease the Giant
Part Two The City
10 An Audience of One
11 Elven Incense
12 Dear Henry
13 The Nth Degree
14 The Edge of a Wood
15 George William Whelp
16 The Faster Beast
17 The Precision of Blood Spatter
18 Ready to Burn
19 Flophouse
21 The Deadest of Ends
22 Hands
23 Addicted to Being Whole
24 Warp and Weft
25 A Cloud on a Windless Day
26 Sunlight and Filth
27 Titans
28 The Way Things Are
29 A Bad Destiny
30 Proof
31 Broken Ghosts
Part Three Eden
32 A Fairy Story
33 The Statuary
35 Big as Bedsheets
36 A Thousand Octobers
37 Creeping Disease
38 Leftover Miracles
39 Tooth and Claw
40 Paperweight
41 Like Father, Like Son
42 Once in a Lifetime
43 The Most Beautiful Species
Notes and Acknowledgements