Joshua Ferris - Then We Came to the End

THE TITLE OF THIS BOOK owes a debt of gratitude to Don DeLillo’s Americana.

A special thanks to early teachers: Jane Rice, Anna Keesey, and Brooks Landon. A very special thanks to the codirectors of the MFA program at the University of California at Irvine, Michelle Latiolais and Geoffrey Wolff. Jim Shepard made me a better writer, but just as important, a better reader. Thanks also to Mark Richard and Michael Ryan.

Thank you, Julie Barer, agent extraordinaire. Reagan Arthur at Little, Brown and Mary Mount at Viking UK — wonderful editors. A big thanks to the whole team at Little, Brown.

Thanks to Kathy Bucaro-Zobens, Doug Davis, Amanda Gillespie, Robert Howell, Dave and Deb Kennedy, Dan Kraus, Chris and Keeli Mickus, Dave Morse, Barry and Jennifer Neumann, Arielle Read, Grant Rosenberg, Matthew Thomas, E-fly and Tere, and the Kennedys of Naples, Florida.

Thanks to the UCI Humanities Department, and to Glenn Schaeffer, the International Institute of Modern Letters, and the International Center for Writing and Translation at UCI for establishing the Glenn Schaeffer Award, which provided me with crucial funding.

And to my family, from Illinois to Indonesia, without whom, no book.

JOSHUA FERRIS RECEIVED A BA in English and Philosophy from the University of Iowa and attended the MFA program at the University of California at Irvine. His fiction has appeared in The Iowa Review, Best New American Voices 2005, and Prairie Schooner. He was born in Danville, Illinois, and grew up in Key West, Florida. He lives in Brooklyn.