Fat Man no more.
Acknowledgments
I wrote this book’s first draft as an MFA candidate at New Mexico State University. Tracy Rae Bowling and I were newly married when I started. She was and is my first reader; her love and support make my life and writing possible.
I owe the best parts of this book to my thesis workshop: Tracy, Erin Reardon, Daniel Cameron, Laura Walker, and Craig Holden, who led us.
Thank you to my other writing teachers at NMSU and Butler University: Evan Lavender-Smith, Mark Medoff, Dan Barden, Robert Stapleton, Susan Neville, and Patrick Clauss.
I first had the idea while researching an assignment for Sarah Hagelin’s class. That was lucky. Thank you, Dr. Hagelin.
Thank you to everyone who ever taught me anything, beginning with my mother. Thank you to my father and my brothers.
The characters of Masumi and Hideki owe a great deal to Emiko Ohnuki-Tierny’s Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers and Bernard Millot’s Divine Thunder: The Life and Death of Kamikazes. The portion set in France owes much of its tone and color to Rod Kedward’s France and the French. Horst Rosenthal wrote and drew the Mickey Mouse comic described in “Cathedral.” Roxane Gay and Kyle Minor helped me with several little bits of French. Charlie Tangora gave me the Japanese characters for “remains,” which was another very lucky thing.
If this book seems polished, professional, or concise, it has everything to do with the efforts of my editor, Buzz Poole, and my copy editor, Lori Shine, who makes the trains run on time. Thank you to them and to the Black Balloon team, including Janna Rademacher, David Bukszpan, Jennifer Abel Kovitz, Arvind Dilawar, Barbara Cleveland Bourland, and those I don’t yet know.
Thank you Matt Bell, Patrick deWitt, Robert Lopez, Lindsay Hunter, Blake Butler, Amber Sparks, and again Evan Lavender-Smith, for your good hearts and kind words.
Finally, thank you to the community of readers and writers that has made me feel welcome and wanted over the past five years. If you are reading this now, then you’re part of that community, and I’m so glad.
About the Author
Mike Meginnis has published stories in Best American Short Stories 2012, The Collagist, PANK, and many other venues. He contributes regularly to HTML Giant and Kill Screen. Meginnis earned his MFA at New Mexico State University, where he served as the managing editor of Puerto del Sol. Currently, he operates Uncanny Valley Press with his wife, Tracy Rae Bowling. Meginnis lives and works in Iowa City.
Fat Man and Little Boy is the inaugural recipient of The Horatio Nelson Fiction Prize, an annual award given to a previously-completed manuscript that comes with $5,000 and a Black Balloon Publishing book deal.
This contest has no reading fee and is open to anyone who has previously completed an unpublished original work of fiction of over 50,000 words.
We dedicate this prize to Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, a man who defied convention at every turn. A one-eyed, one armed lunatic genius who never gave up, he began his military career fully intact, but eventually lost his right eye (Corsica, 1793) and his right arm (the Canary Islands, 1797) in battle. He refused to wear an eye patch over the wound and used it to deliberately ignore a direct order from a superior officer during the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801, coining the phrase “turning a blind eye.” When egomaniac and noted short stack Napoleon attempted to use our beloved balloons for evil during the 1798 Battle of Aboukir with a “military balloon corps,” Nelson immediately destroyed the approaching objects, putting a permanent stop to the short-lived European militarization of these symbols of wonder. Our hero.
Like Nelson, we believe in relentless creativity and perseverance against all odds.
Are you the next literary Horatio Nelson we’re looking for?
Check blackballoonpublishing.com for your chance to enter.
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