What a Piece of Work I Am, Preliminaries

What a Piece of Work I Am (A Confabulation)

Dedication

For Mad

Epigraphs

Let not the reader be scandalized by this gravity amid the frivolous; let him rather recall that there is a grandeur in all follies, an energy in all excess.

Charles Baudelaire

"The Painter of Modern Life"

(translated by Jonathan Mayne)

The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea

In a beautiful pea-green boat; . . .
They sailed away, for a year and a day,

To the land where the bong-tree grows; . . .
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,

The moon,

The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.

Edward Lear

"The Owl and the Pussy-Cat"

Each cell is an island: -- the inhabitants, shipwrecked mariners, cast ashore upon it by the adverse blasts of fortune: partners in affliction, indebted to each other for whatever share they are permitted to enjoy of society, the greatest of all comforts.

Jeremy Bentham

Panopticon; or, the Inspection-house; Postscript, Part I

The soul selects her own society,
Then shuts the door;
On her divine majority
Obtrude no more.

Emily Dickinson

Here I inhale profounder strength
And as I am, I speak and move
And things are as I think they are
And say they are on the blue guitar.

Wallace Stevens

"The Man with the Blue Guitar"

Poignant, Dizzying
Karen Karbo, New York Times Book Review
Kraft Cooks Up Another Treat
Timothy Hunter, The Cleveland Plain Dealer

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What Piece of Work I Am is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, dialogues, settings, and businesses portrayed in it are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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First published by Crown Publishers, Inc., 201 East 50th Street, New York, New York 10022. Member of the Crown Publishing Group.

Now available in paperback from Picador USA, a division of St. Martin's Press.

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