Goat Mountain

Acknowledgments

I’D LIKE TO THANK THE JOHN SIMON GUGGENHEIM MEMORIAL Foundation and the University of San Francisco for generous support during the writing of this novel, and Colm Tóibín, Janet Burroway, and David Kirby for recommending me.

I’d also like to thank everyone at Harper, especially Gail Winston, Jonathan Burnham, Jane Beirn, Mark Ferguson, and Maya Ziv, and everyone at InkWell, especially Kim Witherspoon, David Forrer, Lyndsey Blessing, and Charlie Olsen, and Rob Kraitt at Casarotto Ramsay & Associates.

And of course I must thank John L’Heureux and Michelle Carter, because this novel returns to the material of the first short story I ever wrote, more than twenty-five years ago. This is the novel that burns away the last of what first made me write, the stories of my violent family. It also reaches back to my Cherokee ancestry, faced with the problem of what to do with Jesus.