The chapter "Time Passes" references a poem and also two books. "Time Passes" is the title of the middle section of Virginia Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse. The line about "indecisions and revisions" comes from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot. (I read this for the first time in Mrs. Shirley Council's AP English Class -- thanks Mrs. Council!) The next to last line of the chapter, "A human's life is a beautiful mess" is my reworking of the wise Charlotte who says to Wilbur in Charlotte's Web, "A spider's life is a bit of a mess."
The title of the second section of the book The Book of the Dead comes from the name given to a collection of ancient Egyptian funerary texts. These texts gave instructions on how the departed were to conduct themselves in the afterlife.
When Aldous Ghent talks about his "paperwork [having] paperwork," it's a reference to Terry Gilliam's film Brazil.
Though the ending of the book probably looks more like the beginning of Twelfth Night or The Tempest, I was thinking a bit of Shakespeare's problem play The Winter's Tale. In The Winter's Tale, Camillo has a most unusual and beautiful speech about "a cause more promising than a wild dedication of yourselves to unpath'd waters, undream'd shores."
Obviously, the book Owen is reading to Liz is Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt, but that was actually a change I made fairly late into revisions (solely for creative reasons). The original text I used was from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. It's the part beginning with the sentence, "It's all a great mystery."
And that's all I can remember off the top of my head. Elsewhere is filled with many poems, plays, and books I love, so I hope this list might encourage you to go check some of them out.
Extra #1: Hieroglyphics
When I was first writing the book, I had this idea that I'd begin every chapter with an Egyptian hieroglyph. (If you've read the book, you may have noticed the multiple references to Egypt.) I wanted each hieroglyph to thematically relate and to somehow feature the main character, Liz. In this one (which was meant to accompany chapter one), Liz is depicted in her pajamas, which are probably a little funkier than the way they are described in the book. Although I ultimately decided against this idea, my mom drew this prototype for me, and I still think it's lovely.
Allusion to Lucy the pug? No, just my pug at the beach.
