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Summary
Summary
"Poetic, insightful, and deeply moving. David Means is one of my very favorite writers." --Tara Westover, author of Educated
Following the publication of his widely acclaimed, Man Booker-nominated novel Hystopia , David Means here returns to his signature form: the short story. Thanks to his four previous story collections, Means has won himself an international reputation as one of the most innovative short fiction writers working today: an "established master of the form." (Laura Miller, The Guardian ). Instructions for a Funeral --featuring work from The New Yorker , Harper's , The Paris Review , and VICE --finds Means branching out beyond the explorations of violence and trauma with which he is often identified, prominently displaying his sly humor and his inimitable way of telling tales that deliciously wind up to punch the reader in the heart. With each story Means pushes into new territory, writing with tenderness and compassion about fatherhood, marriage, a homeless brother, the nature of addiction, and the death of a friend at the hands of a serial-killer nurse. Means transmutes a fistfight in Sacramento into a tender, life-long love story; two FBI agents on a stakeout in the 1920s into a tale of predator and prey, paternal urges and loss; a man's funeral instructions into a chronicle of organized crime, real estate ventures, and the destructive force of paranoia.
Means's work has earned him comparisons to Flannery O'Connor, Alice Munro, Sherwood Anderson, Denis Johnson, Edgar Allan Poe, Anton Chekhov, and Raymond Carver but his place in the American literary landscape is fully and originally his own.
"David Means is a master of tense, distilled, quintessentially American prose. Like any artist who has finely honed his talent to its strongest expression he is a brilliant craftsman whose achievement is to appear unstudied, even casual . . . Each story by Means which I have read is unlike the others, unexpected and an unnerving delight." --Joyce Carol Oates
Author Notes
David Means was born and raised in Michigan. His Assorted Fire Events earned the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction and The Secret Goldfish was short-listed for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize. The Spot was selected as a 2010 Notable Book by The New York Times and won the O. Henry Prize. His first novel, Hystopia , was published in 2016 to wide acclaim and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Means's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker , Harper's Magazine , Esquire , The Best American Short Stories , The O. Henry Prize Stories , and numerous other publications. He lives in Nyack, New York, and teaches at Vassar College.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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 compassionate and mischievous. In the title story, a man directs every last detail of his own send-off ("Please tilt the coffin slightly toward the room so that a view of my body is unavoidable.") in a letter that doubles as a tale of betrayal foretold. Often, stories contain told tales, creating an aura of oral history. In the wonderfully digressive "The Ice Committee," a Vietnam vet tries to tell a story he's already told to a man who's already heard it, about a story he once told someone else. In the gripping "El Morro," a dreamer holds two women captive from northern California to New Mexico with his ceaseless mania. Characters in "Fistfight, Sacramento, August 1950" and "The Tree Line, Kansas, 1934" interrogate explosions of violence with the attention to detail of the obsessed. What Means writes about his dying father in the autofictional "Confessions" aptly describes his own distinct style of storytelling: "He is consumed in the vortex of the moment." Means spins intricate, highly textured yarns with great artistry, care, and an acute, empathetic eye. Treasures abound. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Means' fifth collection cements his reputation as one of the finest, and most idiosyncratic, practitioners of short fiction in contemporary literature.The 14 stories here revolve around themes of dislocation, in both the personal and the collective realms. Means begins with a declaration: "I've been writing stories for thirty years now," he observes, "many published, others not published but trashed, put to bed, dead in the water.There's simply no way to distill or describe what's in the stories, except to say I attempt, to say the least, to respect whatever each story seems to want." The conditionality is revealing; in many ways, it marks the ethos of the book. Stories, Means is saying, don't happen to us so much as they grow out of us, which makes them connective in the deepest sense. And yet, as is also true of the work in his previous collections, connection is fleeting, illusory, incomplete. In "The Chair," a father tries to discipline his young son even as he understands the gesture to be futile in a larger sense. Every moment, in other words, contains the seeds of its dissolution. "As I lifted him and felt his weight," the narrator reflects, "the purity of the moment vanished and I would smell the stale, tart odor under his collar while he smelled, I suppose, the smoke and coffee on my breath and something else that later, at some point, perhaps even in memory, he would recognize as the first hints of decay." The title story, on the other hand, looks at things from the other end of the telescope: an older man's instructions for his funeral, written (as it must be) while he is still among the living; "Everything, right now, is safe and cozy," the story concludes. Think about the implications of that sentence: a man sitting in the drowsy security of his own existence, writing lines to be read by someone else after he is gone.In this magnificent book, we find the stories of every one of us: absent and present, dislocated and connected, at the mercy of our history, our narratives. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
With his debut novel, Hystopia (2016), Means proved he is a gifted long-form storyteller. But his follow-up, his fifth story collection since 1991, affirms his position as one the best story writers of his generation. His sinewy, digressive prose moves seamlessly in and out of dreams, memories, and anticipation, defying time and forming riveting meditations on longing and regret. A group of recovering addicts in Farewell, My Brother sneaks out of their halfway house to share cigarettes and stories of their shortcomings. In The Terminal Artist, a woman's death haunts her friends years later when they learn that her nurse was a convicted mercy killer. A tussle outside a bar gradually reveals a love relationship built on classist assumptions in Fistfight, Sacramento, August 1950. Some of the most intimate pieces are those centered on family life. In The Chair, a stay-at-home father struggles to balance authority and fear in his relationships with his toddler son and ambitious wife. As in his previous work, Means' protagonists have a lot to confess. But what might feel like rambling or ranting reveals an abundance of hope and heartache in the stories people tell themselves in order to survive.--Jonathan Fullmer Copyright 2019 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
GINGERBREAD, by Helen Oyeyemi. (Riverhead, $27.) For her new novel - a meditation on family and what it means to be part of a community - Oyeyemi has taken old fairy tales, seasoned them with 20th-century history and pop-culture references, and frosted them with whimsical detail. I.M.: A Memoir, by Isaac Mizrahi. (Flatiron, $28.99.) Throughout this autobiography by one of America's most acclaimed designers of the 1990s, his innovation and confidence are evident, contrasting with an industry that, despite its superficial fickleness, can be deeply resistant to change. TRUTH IN OUR TIMES: Inside the Fight for Press Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts, by David E. McCraw. (All Points, $28.99.) McCraw, the deputy general counsel of The Times, leads readers through some of his most memorable cases, particularly those involving Donald Trump. He expresses concern about the crisis of public trust, stating that "the law can do only so much." MADAME FOURCADE'S SECRET WAR: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler, by Lynne Olson. (Random House, $30.) Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, who fought the Nazis while enduring sexism in her ranks, is little remembered today. Olson argues that she should be celebrated. INSTRUCTIONS FOR A FUNERAL: Stories, by David Means. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) Means's fifth collection, populated with adulterers and criminals, railroad bums and other castaways, suggests that beneath every act of violence there pulses a vein of grace. GOOD WILL COME FROM THE SEA, by Christos Ikonomou. Translated by Karen Emmerich. (Archipelago, paper, $18.) This collection of linked stories, set on an unnamed Aegean island and featuring a cast of wry, rough-talking Greeks reeling from the country's economic devastation, showcases Ikonomou's wit, compassion and infallible ear for the demotic. OUTSIDERS: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World, by Lyndall Gordon. (Johns Hopkins University, $29.95.) Gordon links five visionaries who made literary history - George Eliot, Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, Olive Schreiner and Virginia Woolf - through their shared understanding of death and violence. THE TWICE-BORN: Life and Death on the Ganges, by Aatish Taseer. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) Attempting to rediscover his traditional Indian roots through the study of Sanskrit, a journalist finds himself alienated from them. HOUSE OF STONE, by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma. (Norton, $26.95.) This ambitious and ingenious first novel uses a young man's search for his personal ancestry as a way of unearthing hidden aspects of Zimbabwe's violent past. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
