by Susan Choi
Are we still recognized if seen by the wrong eyes?
But by then it was too late to go back and say, “Tell me her name.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing fiction is like dreaming; the recognizable and the unthinkable, the mundane and the monstrous, coalesce in the least predictable ways, in the end turning into something entirely unlike real life, and yet hopefully relevant in some way to our shared human life. The writing of this book was no less a strange dreamlike process than writing ever is, but unlike most dreamers, I had lots of help. Thank you to Rebecca Lowe, Jason Nodler, and all my classmates and teachers at Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, emphatically the right-side-up to my fictional upside-down CAPA, and a place of dreams, not nightmares. Thank you to Seth King and Semi Chellas for their early enthusiasm for the manuscript and for some of the ideas which brought the dream-parts together. Thank you to Lynn Nesbit for early guidance, to Jin Auh for knowing when the story was done and for bringing the manuscript home, to Barbara Jones and everyone at Henry Holt for making that home so welcoming, and to the MacDowell Colony for precious space and time. Last but most, thank you Elliot, Dexter, and Pete.
ALSO BY SUSAN CHOI
My Education
A Person of Interest
American Woman
The Foreign Student
About the Author
SUSAN CHOI is the author of the novels My Education, A Person of Interest, American Woman, and The Foreign Student. She has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award and winner of the PEN/W. G. Sebald Award and the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction. With David Remnick, she coedited Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker. She’s received NEA and Guggenheim Foundation fellowships. She lives in Brooklyn. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Trust Exercise
Trust Exercise
Trust Exercise
Acknowledgments
Also by Susan Choi
About the Author
Copyright
TRUST EXERCISE. Copyright © 2019 by Susan Choi. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.henryholt.com
Cover design by Nicolette Seeback
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Choi, Susan, 1969– author.
Title: Trust exercise / a novel / Susan Choi.
Description: First Edition.|New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018032027|ISBN 9781250309884 (hardcover)
ISBN 9781250222022 (international)
Subjects:|GSAFD: Love stories.
Classification: LCC PS3553.H584 T78 2019|DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018032027
e-ISBN 9781250309891
First Edition: April 2019
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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.