Thank you to Northwestern University Press for first publishing The Nature of Truth in 2003, and to Arte Público Press for publishing this revised and updated paperback edition in 2014. The story remains roughly the same, with a few important changes. I tightened the language and, I hope, removed what was not essential, all with the goal of making this novel a good experience for readers.
I also want to thank Yale University and so many individuals there who have been instrumental in nurturing my love of philosophy in literature. The university was my haven as a graduate student enthralled with ideas and literature. The late Professor Maurice Natanson guided me through the history of phenomenology as a teacher, and helped to deepen my appreciation of teaching as a craft when I was his teaching assistant for an undergraduate course in “Philosophy in Literature.” The late Professor John Hollander invited me to become his teaching assistant in “Daily Themes,” and showed a generosity toward this graduate student who was not even in his English department. I have never forgotten that. I also want to thank Professor Karsten Harries for teaching me about Nietzsche and Heidegger, and Professor Michael Della Rocca for reading the first edition of the novel. I wrote my first short story at Yale, about a Chicano calling his abuelita on the Mexican-American border to argue about Heidegger. I wanted to break stereotypes, to communicate a complex idea through a story, and to cross geographical as well as intellectual borders. Yale was this unique place that encouraged these disparate worlds to come together, and I will always be grateful for that opportunity to be a part of it.
My deepest gratitude is reserved for my wife Laura. She has been by my side for decades, since we first jogged together by the Charles River to Fresh Pond, and back. Our two sons, Aaron and Isaac, have taught me about curiosity and courage. I have tried to teach them about the tenacity and character that I learned from my parents—their abuelitos—Rodolfo and Bertha Troncoso. As I have said many times, “Ysleta has as much to teach Yale, as Yale has to teach Ysleta.”