Christine Sneed’s story “The First Wife” (NER 31.4, 2010) was selected for the 2012 O. Henry Prize Stories. Read “Interview with the Second Wife,” from NER 30.4:

Eleven years ago, a young man traveled through four states to meet with me. It was a few months after Patric had died, and until yesterday, I don’t think I had thought about this man in a few years. His name was in yesterday’s paper, not on the front page, but this is a newspaper at least two or three million people read each day, and here was this man’s name, section 2, page 4, the story an unfortunate one. It seems he had plagiarized a large portion of one of his former students’ dissertations and sent it off into the world as his own. The student had died two years earlier, in a diving accident somewhere in Italy, but his girlfriend recognized the prose that Dr. Krenek had claimed to have written.

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