Babayaga: A Novel (55 page)

Authors: Toby Barlow

BOOK: Babayaga: A Novel

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HISTORICAL NOTE

The Central Intelligence Agency’s infiltration of various European literary movements centered in Paris has been vigorously documented. The agency’s influence on global, especially European, advertising during the same era is more anecdotal, though any serious research would possibly reward the diligent. While popular mythology dates the decline of Detroit as coincident with the ’67 Twelfth Street Riot, in fact the “Paris of the Midwest” began losing its sizable population more than a decade earlier (see
Time
magazine’s article “Detroit in Decline,” published in 1961). As for the immigration of various castes of Russians into Western Europe following the 1917 revolution—including White Russian nobility, Orthodox clergy, and other curious figures—this too has been the subject of both history and speculation.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the coven who coaxed & encouraged, first Liz Boone and my mom & sis and also Stephanie Cabot, Sylvie Rabineau, Jennifer Barth, Carolyn Mugar, Audi Martel, Sophia Rzankowski, Catherine Bull, Kat Hartman, Helen Ectors, Shannon Cobb, Valerie Elbrick, Susanne Hilberry, and the two stars who guide me through the dark, Nora Montana & Carolina Rose.

Much gratitude too to my ever-bemused editor Sean McDonald & the crew at FSG, to Lorin Stein & the gang at
The Paris Review
, and special thanks to Ambassador Hartman for leading me to his tailor.

ALSO BY TOBY BARLOW

Sharp Teeth

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barlow, Toby.

Babayaga / Toby Barlow. — First edition.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-374-10787-1 (Hardcover)

1. France—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3602.A775624 B33 2013

813'.6—dc23

2013008712