Hannah Pittard - Listen to Me

Wordsworth (specifically, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”)

St. Augustine (“the bleak little minute of irrational sadness”)

Thomas Hobbes (“nasty, brutish, and short”)

Arthur Schopenhauer (“Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills” and “Hope is the confusion of the desire for a thing with its probability.”)

My dear friends Mark Rader and Maggie Vandermeer, who loaned me their perfect names

Ben Warner, who has now read every novel I’ve written — good or bad — and has advised me honestly throughout

Andrew Ewell, my husband, for his epic advice and constant confidence

Helen Atsma, for bringing this novel to life

Maria Massie, for shepherding it to its final home

Everyone who has ever encouraged me (the list is long, but you know who you are)

Bookstores and booksellers everywhere (this list is longer)

And, finally, you — the reader: thank you for reading…

HANNAH PITTARD is the author of the novels Reunion and The Fates Will Find Their Way . Her stories have appeared in the American Scholar, McSweeney’s , and other publications. She is the winner of the 2006 Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award, a MacDowell Colony Fellow, and a consulting editor for Narrative . She teaches fiction in the MFA program at the University of Kentucky.

Visit her website at www.hannahpittard.com