Funeral for a Dog: A Novel (32 page)

My immense gratitude

Katharina Adler for always being there; Adler & Söhne for every seventh sentence; Ross Benjamin for his meticulousness and friendly persistence; Christine Bredenkamp; Erin Edmison for getting me started in the first place; my thesis advisor Bettina Friedl for her leniency; Daniela Greven; Josef Haslinger; Patrick Hutsch; Thomas Janiszewski; Laura Kovero; Benjamin Lauterbach; Johann Christoph Maass; Timo Meisel; Mika Jasper Petersenn; Olaf Petersenn; Jens Pfeifer for his anthropology; my parents Winfried & Elisabeth Pletzinger for everything; Charlotte Roos; Carol Houck Smith for seeing this project through in the most miraculous ways; Saša Staniši
for his glowing enthusiasm, his assurance, and his stories; Gerald Stern for his poetry and encouragement; Dieter Wellershoff; Juli Zeh; and finally and most of all my wife Bine Nordmeyer for her immeasurable patience (this book is hers).

The work on
Funeral for a Dog
was supported by Kulturstiftung des Freistaates Sachsen, Sparkassen-Kulturstiftung Rheinland, and the Max-Kade-Foundation. The translation of this book was generously supported by the Goethe-Institut’s Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Grant program.

Thomas Pletzinger was born in 1975 and grew up in Germany’s industrial area Ruhrgebiet. He holds an MA from Hamburg University and an MFA from the German Literature Institute Leipzig. He has worked for publishers and a literary scouting agency in New York and participated in the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. In 2009, he was Writer-in-Residence at Deutsches Haus at New York University, and in the spring of 2010 he taught at Grinnell College in Iowa. Pletzinger lives in Berlin where he works as a novelist, screenwriter, and translator. He has received various literary awards and fellowships, among them the Uwe-Johnson Prize in 2009 and the NRW Prize for Young Artists.
Funeral for a Dog
is his first novel.

www.thomaspletzinger.com

Ross Benjamin is a writer and translator living in Nyack, New York. He was awarded the 2010 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for his translation of Michael Maar’s
Speak
,
Nabokov
(Verso Books). His other translations include Friedrich Hölderlin’s
Hyperion
(Archipelago Books), Kevin Vennemann’s
Close to Jedenew
(Melville House), and Joseph Roth’s
Job
(Archipelago).

www.rossmbenjamin.com