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375 Excerpts of the novel have appeared in the following journals : Cavalier, the Collagist, Fairy Tale Review, Meridian, Sonora Review, Sou’wester, Super Arrow, Tammy, Third Coast, the Tusculum Review, and in the 2010 Best American Fantasy anthology. My thanks to the following editors: Matt Bell, Kate Bernheimer, Kevin Brockmeier, Joe Collins, Amanda Goldblatt, JoAnna Novak, Heather Patterson, Anna Shearer, Minal Shekhawat, Astrid Slagle, Rachel Swearingen, Wayne Thomas, Valerie Vogrin, and Christina Yu. I would like to thank the following organizations for lending support and solitude during the writing of this book: the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, Château de Lavigny, Blue Mountain Center, Hawthornden Castle, and Hedgebrook. I would also like to thank these people, Acknowledgements 376 for their kindness, advice, encouragment, intellect, imagination , and example: Valerie Vogrin, Jaimy Gordon, Marshall Klimasewiski, Kathryn Davis, Wallace Stevens, Connie Lunn, Marilyn Annucci, Rachel Cantor, Ander Monson, Margo Berdeshevsky, Kerri Webster, Kathleen Finneran, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Heather Streckfus-Green, Scott Heim, Mary O’Connell, Wes Smith, Brotherjeb Bolan, Matt Dube, Wayne Zade, Meg Sefton, Danielle Dutton, Evan Williams, my terrific writing program and English Department colleagues at the University of Alabama, all the wonderful people who work in the MFA program at Pacific University, and all my fabulist students. I wish to thank Jerry Dziecichowicz of the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office of the State of Maryland for speaking with me about Frances Glessner Lee and allowing me to examine and photograph the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Kate Bernheimer, without whose fiction and fairy tale championship the world would be less darkly magical and therefore a good deal less inviting. Janie Painter I thank for a lifetime of sisterly wit, warmth, and unconditional enthusiasm . Tom Mahoney I am grateful to for his wise-foolery and love, without which I would never have made it out of high school, or this book, alive. ...

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