Portions of this book have appeared previously in the following magazines: “The English Pupil” in The Southern Review; “The Littoral Zone” and “Soroche” in Story; “The Marburg Sisters” in New England Review; “The Behavior of the Hawkweeds” in The Missouri Review. My thanks to those magazines and their editors. “Rare Bird” first appeared in The Writing Path: An Anthology of New Writing from Writers’ Conferences and Festivals (University of Iowa Press); my thanks to them as well.
“The Behavior of the Hawkweeds” was selected for Best American Short Stories, 1995 (Jane Smiley, Guest Editor).
Grateful acknowledgment is also made to the National Endowment for the Arts, for its generous support, and to the MacDowell Colony, for its gift of time and space.
Finally, my thanks to Margot Livesey, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Sarah Stone, and Carol Houck Smith, for their insightful reading and thoughtful suggestions.