by Dan Chaon
This book pays homage, and owes a great deal, to many fantastic and better writers who inspired me, both in childhood and beyond, including Robert Arthur, Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, Daphne du Maurier, John Fowles, Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, Ira Levin, C. S. Lewis, H. P. Lovecraft, Vladimir Nabokov, Joyce Carol Oates, Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Peter Straub, J.R.R. Tolkien, Thomas Tryon, and a number of others. One of the fun things about writing this book was making gestures and winks toward these writers that I’ve adored, and I hope that they—living and dead—will forgive my incursions.
Support during the writing of this book came in the form of grants from the Ohio Arts Council and the Oberlin College Research Grant Program. I am deeply thankful for their help.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DAN CHAON is the acclaimed author of You Remind Me of Me, which was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, The Christian Science Monitor, and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications. Ballantine has also published two collections of his short stories: Fitting Ends and Among the Missing, which was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award.
Chaon’s work has appeared in many journals and anthologies including Best American Short Stories of 1996 and 2003, the Pushcart Prize 2000, 2002, and 2003, and the O. Henry Prize Stories, 2001. His fiction has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction in 2002 and 2007. He was the recipient of the 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Chaon lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and teaches at Oberlin College.
Await Your Reply is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2009 by Dan Chaon
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Henry Holt and Company, LLC, and The Random House Group Ltd. for permission to reprint an excerpt from “The Road Not Taken” from the book The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem, published by Jonathan Cape. Copyright © 1916, 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, copyright © 1944 by Robert Frost. Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company, LLC, and by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. Rights in the United Kingdom are controlled by The Random House Group Ltd.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Chaon, Dan.
Await your reply : a novel / Dan Chaon.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-345-51702-9
1. Identity theft—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3553.H277A95 2009
813′.54—dc22 2009021245
www.ballantinebooks.com
v3.0