Jarzaberwoky

alexbracken:

booksmatter:

The dedication: not only choosing to whom but how. After completing a book, one might feel all word-ed out. How to dream up an earnest, yet poetic, dedication?

Well, these authors had no trouble at all, leading me to wonder if some of them wrote their dedications first. Young writers: stop your memoir, your novel, your screenplay this instant and write the perfect dedication before it’s too late!

Clockwise from top left:

One thousand love letters

To Rosemarie, my mother, origin of all happiness, poetry, song.
To Judith and Zenka, who gave me France.
To Barbara, Dixie, Laura, and Angela, dear friends.
And as always, to Helen.

—Carole Maso, Ava (Dalkey Archive Press, 2002)

FOR STEPHANIE—

my sun,
my moon,
my star and satellite

—Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master’s Son (Random House, 2012)

For no one

—Blake Butler, There Is No Year (Harper Perennial, 2011)

For my mother, the root.
For my father, the wanderer.
For my sister, the poet.
For my brother, the peaceful heart.
For Michael, fiery joy.

—Kieja Parssinen, The Ruins of Us (Harper Perennial, on sale today!)

Also extremely hard to nail: acknowledgments.

Alex and I are, for lack of a better word, gestating our next novels at approximately the same rate, ergo I’m in the same position right now: dedication and acknowledgments—WUT DO I DO? I keep going to back and forth on both. I love acknowledgments in books, it’s the first thing of a book I read usually, but three pages is a little self-indulgent and so I’m trying for brevity and honesty. I also have a bunch of books I used for research to list this time, so I’m keeping my personal acknowledgements super short.