Someone's Uncle: A Story

By Alison Espach

Alison Espach, acclaimed author of The Adults, brings her razor sharp insight and storytelling magic to bear in this entrancing tale.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribner
• Release date: Sep 27, 2011
• ISBN: 9781451672213

Alison Espach

Alison Espach is a graduate of the Washington University in St. Louis MFA program.  Her writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, Five Chapters, Glamour and other magazines. She grew up in Connecticut and now teaches creative writing in New York.

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

Copyright © 2011 by Alison Espach

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First Scribner ebook edition September 2011

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978-1-4516-7221-3

eISBN-13: 978-1-4516-7221-3

Uncle Jack is not my uncle, but he tells me I should call him such. I don’t feel comfortable referring to anyone who is not my uncle as uncle, but Uncle Jack insists and holds out a glass of wine that he fermented in his own basement. Two different kinds, all made in the same oak, he has told us a million times this afternoon. There are tricks, he says, to getting American wood to taste like French.

We are staying with Uncle Jack for two weeks, all four of us. My husband, Stephen, and Lillian and her husband, Kenneth. After my father died, Lillian, being the good friend that she was, said, I have an uncle in Germany. I never had an uncle anywhere interesting, but I always had friends who had an uncle in Lake George, an