by Finny (v5)
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to the organizations that supported me while I was writing this book: the Michener-Copernicus Society of America, the Hawthornden Fellowship, the Bookhampton Fellowship, the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, the Southampton Writers’ Conference, and the Bogliasco Foundation.
I owe a huge debt of gratitude to a number of teachers and writers for their generosity, advice, and encouragement: Ethan Canin, Bob Shacochis, Elizabeth McCracken, Maxine Rodburg, Melissa Bank, and Betsy Bolton.
Thank you to Ayesha Pande, my inimitable agent, for your intelligence, guidance, and dedication; to Millicent Bennett for your peerless insights, energy, thoughtfulness, and humor; to Jill Schwartzman for so many great ideas, so much enthusiasm, and such valuable help in the final stages of this book; to Kate Medina for your wisdom and enormously meaningful support over the years; to Linda Swanson-Davies and Glimmer Train magazine; and to Jane von Mehren, Sally Marvin, Beth Pearson, Anne Watters, Kathleen McAuliffe, Lindsey Schwoeri, and the many people at Random House who have given their talents, care, and weekend hours to this book.
Thanks also to Connie Brothers, Lan Samantha Chang, Asali Solomon, Bob Reeves, Christian McLean, Adrienne Unger, Dan Salomon, Jan Zenisek, Deb West, and Marika Alzadon.
And for love and remarkable tolerance, my deepest gratitude to my family: Jim Kramon, Paula Kramon, Annie Kramon, Salli Snyder, Liz Harlan, Ellin Sarot, John Trieu, Sandy Hong, Brian Trieu, and, of course and always, Lynn Trieu.
J USTIN K RAMON is a graduate of Swarthmore College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His work has appeared in Glimmer Train, Story Quarterly, Fence, Boulevard, and TriQuarterly. He has received honors for his fiction from the Michener-Copernicus Society of America, the Hawthornden International Writers’ Fellowship, The Best American Short Stories, and the Bogliasco Foundation. Now twenty-nine years old, he lives in Philadelphia. You can find additional information about Kramon and his work, as well as the reading group guide for Finny, at his website: www.justinkramon.com.
Finny is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Random House Trade Paperback Original
Copyright © 2010 by Justin Kramon
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House
Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House
Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM H OUSE T RADE P APERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Kramon, Justin.
Finny: a novel / Justin Kramon.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-679-60367-2
1. Teenage girls—Fiction. 2. Boarding school students—Fiction. 3. Boarding schools—Fiction.
4. Adolescence—Fiction. 5. Parent and child—Fiction.
6. Friendship—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3611.R365F56 010
813’.6—dc22 2009034297
www.atrandom.com
v3.0