by Tom Bissell
My profound thanks to the editors who first published these stories (in many cases years after they were written and following dozens of rejections): Ted Genoways at the Virginia Quarterly Review; Askold Melnyczuk and Eric Grunwald at Agni; Betsy Sussler and Suzan Sherman at BOMB; Ronald Spatz at Alaska Quarterly Review; Lee Epstein, Eli Horowitz, and Dave Eggers at McSweeney’s; and Calvin Liu at Bullfight. Thanks, finally, to Heather Schroder, Dan Frank, Jenny Minton, and Andrew Miller, for everything.
Permissions Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Harvard University Press: Excerpt from “536: The heart asks pleasure first” from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press). Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Reprinted by permission of the publishers and Trustees of Amherst College and Harvard University Press.
Henry Holt and Company, LLC: Excerpt from “Two Look at Two” from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1951 by Robert Frost. Copyright 1923, © 1969 by Henry Holt and Company. Excerpt from “The Road Not Taken” from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1916, © 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, © 1944 by Robert Frost. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
God Lives in St. Petersburg
TOM BISSELL
Tom Bissell was born in Escanaba, Michigan, in 1974. After graduating from Michigan State University, he taught English in Uzbekistan as a Peace Corps volunteer and then worked for W. W. Norton and Henry Holt as a book editor. He is also the author of Chasing the Sea, a travel narrative, and (with Jeff Alexander) Speak, Commentary, a collection of fake DVD commentaries. He is a contributing editor for Harper’s Magazine and The Virginia Quarterly Review. His work has appeared in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best American Travel Writing, Best American Science Writing, and Best American Short Stories . He currently teaches in Bennington College’s low-residency MFA program and lives in New York City.
ALSO BY TOM BISSELL
Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia
Speak, Commentary:
The Big Little Book of Fake DVD Commentaries,
Wherein Well-Known Pundits Make Impassioned Remarks
about Classic Science-Fiction Films
(with Jeff Alexander)
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, JANUARY 2006
Copyright © 2005 by Thomas Carlisle Bissell
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks and Vintage Contemporaries is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
The stories in this collection were previously published in the following: “Aral” in Agni; “Expensive Trips Nowhere” in The Alaska Quarterly Review in slightly different form; “Animals in Our Lives” in Bullfight; “God Lives in St. Petersburg” in McSweeney’s and the Pushcart Anthology XXIX (W. W. Norton, 2004); “Death Defier” in the Virginia Quarterly Review and Best American Short Stories 2005; “The Ambassador’s Son” in BOMB and in the anthology Wild East: Stories from the Last Frontier (Justin Charles & Co., 2003).
Permissions to reprint previously published material can be found at the end of the book.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Bissell, Tom, [date]
God lives in St. Petersburg and other stories / Tom Bissell.
p. cm.
1. Americans—Asia, Central—Fiction.
2. Asia, Central—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.I78G63 2005
813’.6—dc22 2004052232
www.vintagebooks.com
www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-42603-1
v3.0