The Law of Miracles

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments “Hands” and “The Madonna of the Relics” originally appeared in The Kenyon Review; the individual “Problem” pieces originally appeared consecutively as “A Few Moral Problems You Might Like to Ponder, of a Winter’s Evening, in Front of the Fire, with a Cat on Your Lap” in The New England Review, as did “Being and Nothingness (Not a Real Title)”; “Missing, Believed Wiped,” first appeared in The Massachusetts Review; “Presently in Ruins” in StoryQuarterly and The Pushcart Prizes; and “The Law of Miracles” in Fiction under its original title, “Five Ways My Wife Could Die.” In writing the “Moral Problem” pieces, I had to step well out of my own personal experience, and I would like to acknowledge here some of the books that helped me do that: Feng Jicai’s Voices from the Whirlwind; Henry Munson Jr.’s The House of Si Abd Allah; Sam Driver’s Anna Akhmatova; and Harrison E. Salisbury’s The 900 Days. This volume is the sixth recipient of the Juniper Prize for Fiction, established in 2004 by the University of Massachusetts Press in collaboration with the UMass Amherst MFA Program for Poets and Writers, to be presented annually for an outstanding work of literary fiction. Like its sister award, the Juniper Prize for Poetry established in 1976, the prize is named in honor of Robert Francis (1901–1987), who lived for many years at Fort Juniper, Amherst, Massachusetts. JUNIPER PRIZE FOR FICTION ...