by C J Hribal
Portions of this novel originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Witness and in the Sycamore Review. Portions of “Our Mother, the Trouper” appeared in Townships, edited by Michael Martone. Two chapters, “Loose Lips Sink Ships” and “And That’s the Name of That Tune,” appeared in different form in the collection The Clouds in Memphis.
Thanks to Ernie Garven for writing the Hamm’s beer jingle.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
C. J. Hribal is the author of “The Clouds in Memphis,” which won the AWP (Associated Writing Programs) Award in Short Fiction; Matty’s Heart, a collection of short fiction; American Beauty, a novel; and he edited and wrote the introdution for The Boundaries of Twilight: Czecho-Slovak Writing from the New World. Hribal was born in Chicago and grew up on a farm in Wisconsin. He received his B.A. from St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin, and his M.A. in creative writing from Syracuse University, where he studied under Tobias Wolff and the late Raymond Carver. He has held fellowships from the Bush Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. A professor of English at Marquette University and a member of the fiction faculty at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, he lives with his three children in Milwaukee.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2005 by C. J. Hribal
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., for permission to reprint the first four lines of “Maturity” from Selected Poems of Zbigniew Herbert, edited and translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott. English translation copyright © 1968 by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Scott. Introduction copyright © 1968 by A. Alvarez. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Charles Baxter for permission to reprint lines from “At the Center of the Highway.”Copyright © Charles Baxter, courtesy of Darhansoff, Verrill, Feldman Literary Agents.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hribal, C. J.
The company car : a novel / C. J. Hribal.
p. cm.
eISBN 1-58836-468-2
1. Traveling sales personnel—Fiction. 2. Parent and adult child—Fiction. 3. Wedding anniversaries—Fiction. 4. Family reunions—Fiction. 5. Rural families—Fiction. 6. Chicago (Ill.)—Fiction. 7. Catholics—Fiction. 8. Wisconsin—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3558.R52C66 2005
813′.54—dc22 2004058377
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