The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore
Page 54
Acknowledgments
The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore would not exist without the gracious support of its allies. To my agent, Brian DeFiore, thank you for recognizing the potential of this freak show of a novel, and for your spectacular job of shaping it up and selling it; and enormous thanks to my editor, Cary Goldstein, for his tremendous enthusiasm for this book and his careful, incisive edits.
Thank you to the University of Iowa Provost’s Fellowship and the Michener-Copernicus Society of America, and thanks to the fantastic teachers who helped me evolve as a writer: Brian Morton, Paul Lisicky, Brooke Stevens, Ethan Canin, and especially Edward Carey and Lan Samantha Chang, who held this book when it was just a baby.
Particular thanks to Jonathan Ames—the first person to read this whole thing straight through in the scattershot and inchoate state it was in at the time—for being an early advocate of Bruno’s, and for his continued friendship and support further along.
Infinite love and thanks to my parents, Charley and Leigh—who raised me in a house full of books, and who for better or worse made me who I am—and to my brothers, James and John.
Special shout-outs to Jim Mattson, Nimo Johnson, Kate “Hunter Hero” Sachs, Sergei Tsimberov, Roman Skaskiw, Kevin Holden, Andre Perry, Diana Thow, Cara Ellis, Andres Restrepo, John Benjamin, Sam Cooper, Graham Webster, Colin Heintze, Sarah Heyward, Jenny Zhang, Anthony Swofford, Sam Seigle, Gwenda-lin Grewal, and überthanks to Chris Wiley for his unflagging friendship, his apartment, a humdinger of a celebratory dinner, and countless other good turns.
Anna North, I cannot ever thank you enough.
Rock over London, rock on, Chicago.
Thanks to the Great Ape Trust and William Fields for his generous help with my research, and, with Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Duane Rumbaugh, for continuing the fascinating and important pursuit of ape language research.
And thanks to Jane Goodall, who, when I was a teenager, I heard say, “All living things on this planet are far, far closer together than they are apart.”
Great apes are in serious danger. It will be an unforgivable shame on our species if we allow this vital window into understanding ourselves to close forever. To learn about nonfictional ape language research and to support great ape habitat conservation, I urge you to visit www.greatapetrust.org.
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Table of Contents
Front Cover Image
Welcome
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Part Two
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Part Three
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Part Four
Chapter XXVIII
Chapter XXIX
Chapter XXX
Chapter XXXI
Chapter XXXII
Part Five
Chapter XXXIII
Chapter XXXIV
Chapter XXXV
Chapter XXXVI
Chapter XXXVII
Chapter XXXVIII
Chapter XXXIX
Chapter XL
Chapter XLI
Chapter XLII
Chapter XLIII
Chapter XLIV
Part Six
Chapter XLV
Chapter XLVI
Chapter XLVII
Chapter XLVIII
Chapter XLIX
Chapter L
Acknowledgments
About Twelve
About the Author
Copyright
About the Author
BENJAMIN HALE is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, where he received a Provost’s Fellowship to complete this novel, which also went on to win a Michener-Copernicus Award. He has been a night shift baker, a security guard, a trompe l’oeil painter, a cartoonist, an illustrator and a technical writer. He grew up in Colorado and now lives in New York.
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 by Benjamin Hale
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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First eBook Edition: February 2011
ISBN: 978-0-446-57507-2