Given World (31 page)

Who are some of the storytellers who have influenced your work?

Graham Greene, James Baldwin, Malcolm Lowry, Michael Ondaatje, Arundhati Roy, James Welch, Lorrie Moore, Barry Hannah, Louise Erdrich, Thomas McGuane, Jim Crumley, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. For memoir, Joan Didion, Mary Karr, Alexandra Fuller. For poetry, Richard Hugo, Terrance Hayes, Jane Hirschfield. A million others in all camps.

© KELLY RAE DAUGHERTY

Marian Palaia was born in Riverside, California, and grew up there and in Kensington, Maryland. She spent two of her college undergraduate years on a ranch in Montana and studied creative writing in Missoula with Richard Hugo, Rick DeMarinis, and Barry Hannah. She received her BA from The Evergreen State College, moved to San Francisco in 1985, and received her MA in creative writing from San Francisco State University. In 2001 she moved back to Missoula, where she received her master’s in public administration. At the University of Wisconsin—Madison, she studied with Lorrie Moore, Judith Mitchell, Jesse Lee Kercheval, and Rob Nixon, receiving her MFA in 2012. In 2012–2013, she was a John Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University. She currently lives in San Francisco, and has lived in, among other places, Hong Kong, Ho Chi Minh City, and Nepal, where she was a Peace Corps volunteer. She has also worked as a bartender, a landscaper, a truck driver, and as the littlest logger in Lincoln, Montana.

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2015 by Marian Palaia

Portions of this novel were first published in slightly different form: “Prologue” and “Two Days, Then the Bus to Cambodia” were published as “Cu Chi” in
Virginia Quarterly Review
, Fall 2012. “Take You Back Broken” was published in
TriQuarterly
as “The Last Place She Stood” in Spring 2013. “Girl, Three Speeds, Pretty Good Brakes” was published in
Passages North
, Spring, 2003.

Jane Hirshfield, “At Night,” from
Of Gravity & Angels
, © 1988 by

Jane Hirshfield, reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.

Excerpt from “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” by Country Joe and the Fish, words and music by Joe McDonald, © 1965, renewed 1993 by Alcatraz Corner Music Co. BMI, reprinted by permission.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition April 2015

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Interior design by Akasha Archer

Jacket lettering by Lynn Buckley

Jacket art by Shasti O’Leary-Soudant

Photographs by NASA, Shutterstick and iStock

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Palaia, Marian.

 The given world / Marian Palaia.—First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition.

  pages cm

 1. Young women—Fiction. 2. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 3. Missing persons—Fiction. 4. Vietnam War, 1961–1975—Veterans—Fiction. I. Title.

 PS3616.A33865G58 2015

 813'.6—dc23

ISBN 978-1-4767-7793-1

ISBN 978-1-4767-7805-1 (ebook)