Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Ellen Levine for steadfast faith and invaluable support.

Thanks also: to Dean Paul Sherwin and Maxine Chernoff at San Francisco State, to Betsy Uhrig for her generous and infinite patience, to Lynn Warshow for her careful eye over the course of four books, to Carolyn O’Keefe for her tireless advocacy, as well as to Eric Orner, Ronald Orner, David Krause, Nick Regiacorte, Audrey Petty (who dreams about Harold Washington also), Alex Gordon, Rob Preskill, Melissa Kirsch, Tom Barbash, Jason Roberts, Junse Kim, and Ed Schwartzchild.

And finally and foremost: to Katie and Phoebe.

I also wish to express my gratitude to the editors of the following publications, where stories in this collection first appeared: “Foley’s Pond” and “The Vac-Haul” in the Paris Review; “At the Kitchen Table” and “Dyke Bridge” in Granta; “Eisendrath” (as “No Light”), “Paddy Bauler in a Quiet Moment,” “The Mayor’s Dream,” and “Harold Washington Walks at Midnight” in A Public Space; “Geraldo, 1986” and “Shhhhhh, Arthur’s Studying” in Conjunctions; “Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge” in the Harvard Review; “Pampkin’s Lament” in McSweeney’s; “Occidental Hotel” and “The Divorce” in Narrative; “Herb and Rosalie Swanson at the Cocoanut Grove” and “Spokane” in Bomb; “February 26, 1995” in Guernica; “Grand Pacific Hotel, Chicago, 1875” in Ploughshares; “Reverend Hrncirik Receives an Airmail Package” in the Southern Review; “Horace and Josephine” in Ninth Letter; “Denny Coughlin: in Memory” in Grantland; “The Moors of Chicago” in Once; “Waldheim” in New American Writing; “Renters” in World Literature Today; “Plaza Revolución, Mexico City, 6 a.m.” in Witness; and “Longfellow” and “1979” in Zyzz yva.

Thanks as well to the editors of The Black Warrior Review, 14 Hills, Cadillac Cicatrix, the Cincinnati Review, the Cellar Door, Cutbank, Lost, the Mississippi Review, Northeastern Magazine, Northeastern Law Magazine, and Third Coast.

“Nathan Leopold Writes…” first appeared in Chicago Noir (Akashic Books, New York); “Belief, 1999” appeared in The Return of Král Majáles (Litteraria Pragensia Books / Charles University, Czech Republic).

“On the 14” appeared as “On the 88” in the San Francisco Chronicle.

“Pampkin’s Lament” was reprinted in Pushcart Prize XXXII.

The line at the end of “The Poet” is from William Meredith’s “The Wreck of the Thresher (Lost at Sea, April 10, 1963)” from Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems (Triquarterly Books / Northwestern University Press).