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The Spot is an old blacksmith shed in which three men tweeze apart the intricacies of a botched bank robbery.
The Spot is a park on the Hudson River, where two lovers sense their affair is about to come to an end.
The Spot is at the bottom of Niagara Falls, where the body of a young girl floats as if caught in the currents of her own tragic story.
The Spot is in the ear of a Manhattan madman plagued by a noisy upstairs neighbor .
The Spot is a suburban hospital room in which a young father confronts his son's potentially devastating diagnosis.
The Spot is a dusty encampment in Nebraska where a gang of inept radicals plot a revolution.
The Spot draws thirteen new stories together into a masterful collection that shows David Means at his finest: at once comically detached and wrenchingly affecting, expansive and concise, wildly inventive and firmly rooted in tradition. Means's work has earned him comparisons to Flannery O'Connor (London Review of Books), Alice Munro, Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac (Newsday), Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson (Chicago Tribune/NPR), Denis Johnson (Entertainment Weekly), Poe, Chekhov, and Carver (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel), but the spot he has staked out in the American literary landscape is fully and originally his own.
The Spot is a park on the Hudson River, where two lovers sense their affair is about to come to an end.
The Spot is at the bottom of Niagara Falls, where the body of a young girl floats as if caught in the currents of her own tragic story.
The Spot is in the ear of a Manhattan madman plagued by a noisy upstairs neighbor .
The Spot is a suburban hospital room in which a young father confronts his son's potentially devastating diagnosis.
The Spot is a dusty encampment in Nebraska where a gang of inept radicals plot a revolution.
The Spot draws thirteen new stories together into a masterful collection that shows David Means at his finest: at once comically detached and wrenchingly affecting, expansive and concise, wildly inventive and firmly rooted in tradition. Means's work has earned him comparisons to Flannery O'Connor (London Review of Books), Alice Munro, Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac (Newsday), Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson (Chicago Tribune/NPR), Denis Johnson (Entertainment Weekly), Poe, Chekhov, and Carver (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel), but the spot he has staked out in the American literary landscape is fully and originally his own.
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Reviews
"Means is more than a conventionally accomplished realistic story writer. As I've written before in these pages, his fiction sometimes skitters up to the borderline of legend . . . he can produce work that holds up even in comparison with his most gifted ancestors like Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway, employing some of the most sharp-edged and beautifully spare language of any writer of his
Alan Cheuse, The Chicago Tribune
"David Means revives the American short story in this quietly compelling collection about adulterous Manhattanites, violent train-yard drifters, pensive madmen, and concerned fathers. It's as if the works of Poe and Kerouac had been rewritten by Cheever."
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