Authors: John Gardner

In the Suicide Mountains (14 page)

Gardner's children, Joel and Lucy, circa 1975. Joel is the founder of Camp Gardner Films, and Lucy works in publishing. Both currently live in Massachusetts.

Gardner playing the French horn around 1979. He began playing in high school and played in the Batavia Civic Orchestra.

Gardner and Liz Rosenberg at their wedding on Valentine's Day, 1980. Liz's dress was a wedding gift from John, who had it made in Kansas City by a woman he had met at a reading there. Liz later remembered that instead of following her specifications, the dressmaker made her “Cleopatra's shroud.”

Gardner in the early 1980s. In the last years before his death, he had become much more interested in politics than in literature, declaring at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in 1982 that “if you're not writing politically, you're not writing.”

Selected images from The John Gardner Papers, Department of Rare Books/Special Collections, University of Rochester.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The abbot's tales and the baby's tales are adapted from traditional Russian fairy tales as collected by Aleksandr Afanas'ev, translated by Norbert Guterman.

cover design by Robin Bilardello

ISBN: 978-1-4532-0326-2

This 2010 edition distributed by Open Road Integrated Media
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com