Brittle Innings (49 page)

Acknowledgements

In addition to my family, I must thank these people: Howard Morhaim, my indefatigable agent; Lou Aronica, an editor and publisher who likes baseball as much as I do; Jennifer Hershey, who edited the ms. with intelligence and care; Eddie Hall, who sent me a little book about baseball in the nineteenth century; Diane Hughes, who told me about her hemophiliac father; Joel Gotler, who saw the film possibilities in this material; John Kostmayer, who did a screenplay based on an early novella-length version of this story; Mark Winegardner, author of
Prophet of the Sandlots
, a masterpiece of sports writing; Michael Hutchins, the originator and operator of a website devoted to my work, who helped me secure a revisable electronic file of the novel and also caught an error in my early-season CVL standings; Patrick Swenson, editor and publisher of Fairwood Press, for this new edition of a work dear to me; Elizabeth Hand, a masterful writer, for her kind introduction to this edition; and, of course, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and the makers of Universal Pictures’
Frankenstein
films of the 1930s.

About the Author

Michael Bishop is the author of the Nebula Award-winning novel
No Enemy But Time
, the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award-winning novel
Unicorn Mountain
, the Shirley Jackson Award-winning short story, “The Pile” (based on notes left behind on his late son Jamie’s computer), and several other novels and story collections, including
The Door Gunner and Other Perilous Flights of Fancy: A Retrospective
, edited by Michael H. Hutchins. He also writes poetry and criticism, and has edited the acclaimed anthologies
Light Years and Dark
, three volumes of the annual Nebula Awards collections, and, more recently,
A Cross of Centuries: Twenty-Five Imaginative Tales About the Christ
, and, with Steven Utley,
Passing for Human
. He is currently working on a Young Adult novel,
Joel-Brock the Brave
, dedicated to his exemplary grandchildren, Annabel English Loftin and Joel Bridger Loftin. Michael Bishop lives in Pine Mountain, Georgia, with his wife, Jeri, an elementary-school counselor. He followed the Atlanta Braves even in the 1980s . . . when they were losing.