David Means, Author . HarperCollins/Fourth Estate $22.95 (211p) ISBN 978-0-00-716489-9
The characters in this imaginative and penetrating story collection—a man hounded by lightning strikes, a driver blown off the Mackinac bridge, a pianist whose fingers stop working, a woman who slaughters her boyfriend after ambiguous...
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David Means, Author Context Books $22 (165p) ISBN 978-1-893956-05-6
Driven by long, majestic sentences, Means's second story collection (after A Quick Kiss of Redemption) explores the oft-misguided ways in which desperate people make contact with each other or with themselves, giving shape to primal desires in a...
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David Means, Author William Morrow & Company $18 (192p) ISBN 978-0-688-09459-1
In 15 stories, Means's characters try to understand one another, but they rarely succeed. Perpetual ships passing in the night, these people may unintentionally get into fistfights (``McGregor's Day On''), or drift into mild infidelities while...
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David Means, Author . FSG/Faber and Faber $23 (164p) ISBN 978-0-86547-912-8
A natural storyteller, Means (The Secret Goldfish
) presents 13 nuanced tales of wanderlust and transgression. Hoboes around a campfire spin elaborate yarns in two of the richest stories, offering just enough confession to keep the others'...
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David Means. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26 (320p) ISBN 978-0-86547-913-5
After four story collections, Means delivers his first novel, and it’s a dazzling and singular trip. The novel within this novel is flanked by interviews, editorial clarifications, and multiple attempts at a suicide note by “author” Eugene Allen, a...
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David Means. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $24 (192p) ISBN 978-0-374-27981-3
For 30 years, Means (Hystopia) has examined the ways in which violence embeds trauma that warps the American character. This superb new collection covers similar geographic, characterological, and thematic ground, yet finds Means at his most...
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David Means. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26 (224p) ISBN 978-0-374-60607-7
Means (Instructions for a Funeral) explores the parameters of existence in his dazzling latest. In the title story, two nurses trade war stories over break—one’s about a doomed junkie dubbed Kidney Boy, another about a serial killer fellow nurse—and
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