Acknowledgments

My deepest gratitude to Robin Lippincott and Sena Jeter Naslund.

Thanks to Sarabande: Sarah Gorham, Kirby Gann, Nickole Brown, Kristina McGrath, Charles Casey Martin, and Betsey Reed.

Thanks to Barry Goldensohn, Sarah Goodwin, Terry Diggory, Leslie Daniels, Sabrina Shakley, Kapil Gupta, Tara Maria, Katie Bradford, Ranjana Varghese, Jason Brown, Christopher Noël, Carol Anshaw, John Caughey, Roxanne Gupta, John Sloan, Lorrie Goldensohn, Greg McHale, Liza Tavtigian, Ann and Jim and clan Gordon (and Alan), Hugh and Janet Graham, Hugh Patterson Graham.

Thanks to Elwood S. Kent, Sr., Gagi Jhangiani, Chatru Jhangiani, Sita Vaswani, Julia Kent, and Nanikram Vaswani.

To Holter Graham, my heart, first and last reader. And to Lugnut.

And finally, to my parents, who taught me to live, love, work, and told me stories.

Some of the stories in this collection originally appeared in the following publications:

American Literary Review: “Bolero”
bananafish: “Bing-Chen” (formerly “Ming”)
Catamaran: South Asian American Writing: “Five

Objects in Queens”

Epoch: “The Pelvis Series”
Global City Review:

“Possession at the Tomb of Sayyed
Pir Hazrat Baba Bahadur Saheed
Rah Aleh”

Hunger Mountain: “Twang (Release)”
The Louisville Review: “Blue, Without Sorrow”
Night Rally: “An Outline of No Direction”
Prairie Schooner: “Where the Long Grass Bends”
Shenandoah: “Sita and Ms. Durber”

Thanks to the above journals for their support. Thanks to Invisible Cities Press and Roger Weingarten for awarding the Italo Calvino Prize to “The Excrement Man.”