Iona Moon (39 page)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Alice Lichtenstein and Mark Robbins read an early draft of this story with extraordinary care and insight; I am thankful to them for all they saw. I also thank Antje Lühl, Ann Patty, Elizabeth Searle, Clare Alexander, Miles Coiner, Caryl Phillips, Fanny Blake, Matthew Archibald, David Gewanter, Irene Skolnick, Fiona McCrae, Andre Dubus, Wendy Thon, and Mary Pinard for their faith and wisdom. I am indebted to Elizabeth Domholdt Shoemaker for her expert opinion on medical questions.

Several sections of this novel first appeared in literary journals; I thank Wendy Lesser, Raymond J. Smith, Joyce Carol Oates, Dan Halpern, and Paula Deitz for their support.

The words of Walt Whitman are from the poem “To a Stranger,” included in
Walt Whitman: The Complete Poems
, edited by Francis Murphy and published by Penguin Books.

I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Arts and the St. Botolph Club Foundation for their generous support of this project.

About the Author

Melanie Rae Thon is an American author of novels and short stories. Originally from Kalispell, Montana, Thon received her BA from the University of Michigan and her MA from Boston University. Her writing has been published in
The Best American Short Stories
, the Pushcart Prize anthologies,
The O. Henry Prize Stories
, Granta's
Best of Young American Novelists, Conjunctions, Tin House
, and the
Paris Review
. Thon is a recipient of the Whiting Writers' Award, the Reading the West Book Award, and the Gina Berriault Award, as well as two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and one from the Tanner Humanities Center. She has also been a writer in residence at the Lannan Foundation. Thon's works have been translated into nine languages. She lives in Salt Lake City and teaches at the University of Utah.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author᾿s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Excerpts from this novel originally appeared in
Threepenny Review, Ontario Review, Hudson Review
, and
Antaeus

Copyright © 1993 by Melanie Rae Thon

Cover design by Tracey Dunham

ISBN: 978-1-4976-8498-0

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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