It was not possible for my grandfather to die. He broke every rule when he did that. God without end.
Acknowledgments
I’D LIKE TO THANK THE JOHN SIMON GUGGENHEIM MEMORIAL Foundation and the University of San Francisco for generous support during the writing of this novel, and Colm Tóibín, Janet Burroway, and David Kirby for recommending me.
I’d also like to thank everyone at Harper, especially Gail Winston, Jonathan Burnham, Jane Beirn, Mark Ferguson, and Maya Ziv, and everyone at InkWell, especially Kim Witherspoon, David Forrer, Lyndsey Blessing, and Charlie Olsen, and Rob Kraitt at Casarotto Ramsay & Associates.
And of course I must thank John L’Heureux and Michelle Carter, because this novel returns to the material of the first short story I ever wrote, more than twenty-five years ago. This is the novel that burns away the last of what first made me write, the stories of my violent family. It also reaches back to my Cherokee ancestry, faced with the problem of what to do with Jesus.
About the Author
David Vann is an internationally bestselling author whose work has been translated into nineteen languages. He is the winner of fourteen prizes, including France’s Prix Médicis étranger, Spain’s Premi Llibreter, the Grace Paley Prize, a California Book Award, the AWP Nonfiction Prize, and France’s Prix des lecteurs de L’Express. His books—Legend of a Suicide, Caribou Island, Dirt, A Mile Down, and Last Day on Earth—have appeared on seventy best books of the year lists in a dozen countries. A former Guggenheim fellow, Wallace Stegner fellow, John L’Heureux fellow, and National Endowment for the Arts fellow, he is a professor at the University of Warwick in England. He has written for the Atlantic, Esquire, Outside, Men’s Journal, McSweeney’s, the Sunday Times, the Observer, the Sunday Telegraph, and many others, and he has appeared in documentaries for the BBC, Nova, National Geographic, and CNN.
www.davidvann.com
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