My late wife, Alison Lurie, who lived to the age of 94, left behind a completed but unpublished manuscript of The Cat Agent, which she had worked on into her late 80s. It was her last work of fiction. She was such a meticulous writer that I had very little editing to do; her plotting was, as always, ingenious and beautifully crafted, her voice always witty and entertaining. Alison’s agent showed the book to big New York publishers, but it wasn’t destined for today’s commercial marketplace; contemporary children’s and young adult books deal with 21st-century social issues and are written in different styles from the one you’ll see in this book. It’s a little old fashioned, in the best sense: an enthusiastic, confidential way of talking to young readers as if they were old friends.

I owe a lot to EPOCH. My first published story appeared there in 1963, when I was 21. I’d written it for Jim McConkey’s Cornell undergraduate writing class; he asked if he could submit it for me to the magazine. (Our friendship, which continued for almost 70 years until he died at 98, was interrupted only by my years living overseas.) When I saw my story, “Galina,” in print in EPOCH, I suddenly stepped up onto a plateau—an exhilarating place from which to look out on my limitless future: I was now a writer, my career aspirations indisputable.