ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS BOOK HAD FOUR EARLY READERS, WHO WERE GENEROUS enough to look at its chapters virtually as I wrote them and tell me what they thought: Rebecca Chace, Erin Clermont, Sheila Keenan, and Corinne Manning. If not for them, I might have abandoned this project. I also thank Jo Ann Beard, Annie Bellerose, Clyde Edgerton, Mark Irwin, Tracy O’Neill, and Carmen Rodriguez, Michael White, and Marci Vogel for reading portions of the work at different times. My gratitude to Renee Sedliar, my editor at Da Capo, and my agent Gillian Mackenzie and her assistant Adriann Ranta for their faith and well-placed doubts. Thanks also to Cisca Schreefel, Jennifer Kelland, Linda Mark, and Jonathan Sainsbury for turning the manuscript into a book, and to Lissa Warren and Sean Maher for publicizing it. Special acknowledgments go to Chris Noland of the Black Cat Fireworks Company, Christina Campbell, and the magnificent Martha Ciattei for furnishing photographs and artwork. Extraordinary thanks to Jesse McCloskey for his original drawings. You can see his paintings at the Claire Oliver Gallery.

Jeanne-Marie Laskas, Donald Bialostosky, and my new colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh offered me an intellectual and professional home after many years of nomadism. I’m also grateful to my teaching cohorts at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, Bard College, the City College of New York, St. Mary’s College of California, the Iowa Summer Writers’ Festival, and Ashland University, especially Marilyn Abildskov, Karen Bender, Sladja Blazan, David Buuck, Peter Campion, Stephen Cope, Philip Gerard, Carmen Gimenez Smith, Kythe Heller, Rebecca Lee, Joe Mackall, Amy Margolis, Miranda Melis, Marie Regan, Joan Retallack, Robert Siegel, Eleni Stecopoulos, Frederic Tuten, Michael White, and David Wolach.

My gratitude to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Richard D. and Mary Jane Edwards Endowed Publication Fund for their support, as well as to the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bellagio Center.

I thank the people who at different times cared for my cats: Jo Ann Beard and Scott Spencer, Heather Dini, Carolina Gonzalez Hutton, Litia Perta, Sheri Sceroler, and the doctors and staff of Rhinebeck Animal Hospital.

My final thanks go to Ellen Trachtenberg and Mary Gaitskill, for reasons they know.

Peter Trachtenberg
May 22, 2012