Inland
Page 38
For my mother, Maja,
and her mother, Zahida
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A great number of incredible people have come into and bettered my life in the years since my first book was published. That they stuck around while Inland was being written is a testament to their love and generosity. They know who they are, and I am grateful to them all.
I’m also grateful, beyond words, to my agent Seth Fishman, and to Rebecca Gardner, Will Roberts, and all the big hearts who make The Gernert Company home; and to my editor, Andrea Walker, as well as Maria Braeckel and my Random House family.
Writers keep writers going, and I am lucky to be kept humble by some of the most talented and hardest-working on earth, a few of whom were kind enough to read early drafts of this novel. Thank you, Parini Shroff, Jared Harel, Andrew Fitzgerald, Jill Stephenson, Bryna Cofrin-Shaw, Rachel Aherin, Catherine Chung, James F. Brooks, Daniel Levine, Alexi Zentner, and Noah Eaker.
I thank my lucky stars for Michael Ray of Zoetrope: All-Story, an unrelenting supporter of all writers, who keeps reminding me that short stories are my first love; and for my students and colleagues at Hunter College.
Without the support of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and the National Endowment for the Arts, of course, this book would never have been written. Thank you for all you do.
It was beautiful to watch the Camel Corps enjoy a kind of return to the national consciousness even as I wrote this book. Inland is, above all, a work of imagination, but the journals, letters, and reports of the men who were a part of at least one aspect of this history, especially May Humphreys Stacey and Edward Fitzgerald Beale, were indispensible to its writing. So was the work of those historians of the American West who have amassed the far-flung details of this weird and fascinating episode, particularly Eva Jolene Boyd, Lewis Burt Lesley, Chris Emmett, Forrest Bryant Johnson, and Gary Paul Nabhan, not to mention the irrepressible Tracy V. Wilson and Holly Frey of Stuff You Missed in History Class.
I am thankful to my family, in the United States and Ireland, for all their love and support.
And to Dan—the source of all things good and true. You make everything possible.
By Téa Obreht
Inland
The Tiger’s Wife
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TÉA OBREHT’s debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife, won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction and was an international bestseller. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and Zoetrope: All-Story, among many others. Originally from the former Yugoslavia, she now lives in New York with her husband and teaches at Hunter College.
teaobreht.com
Instagram: @teaobreht
To inquire about booking Téa Obreht for a speaking engagement, please contact the Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau at speakers@penguinrandomhouse.com.
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