I’m very grateful to my family—Elizabeth, Mary Katherine, and Lowry—for their support, and to my editors who worked on these stories—Harry Foster, Camille Hykes, Elizabeth Kluck-hohn, Tara Masih, and Alison Kerr Miller—and to Julie Burns for her help, as well, and to my agent, Bob Dattila, and typist, Angi Young. I’m proud to have Russell Chatham’s painting on the cover, and I appreciate his cover design and the book design by Anne Chalmers. Thanks also for editorial help to George Plimpton, James Linville, Michael Griffith, and Lois Rosenthal, and to the editors of magazines in which these stories first appeared, in various forms: “The Hermit’s Story,” “The Cave,” and “Two Deer” in the Paris Review; “Swans” in Story; “The Prisoners” in Hayden’s Ferry Review; “The Fireman” in the Kenyon Review; “Presidents’ Day” in Southwest Review; “Real Town” in Epoch; “Eating” in the Southern Review; and “The Distance” in the Black Warrior Review. “The Hermit’s Story” and “The Fireman” also appeared in The Best American Short Stories 1999 and 2001, respectively, and “The Fireman” appeared in Pushcart Prize 2002.
These stories are based on the imagination and the characters in them do not represent any persons known to me, living or not.