- Hardcover: 176 pages
- Publisher: Fourth Estate; First edition edition (4 Mar 2002)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0007135068
- ISBN-13: 978-0007135066
- Product Dimensions: 19.8 x 13.7 x 2.3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,475,946 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
Product Description
Review
One of the best American collections of the last ten years…This is food for the hungry.’ Jonathan Franzen
‘His writing blazes with originality and self-assuredness…A striking new voice in American fiction.’ The Times
‘Worlds collide and spring apart…this sort of thing happens all the time in life, yet I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone bother to express it so devastatingly in literature.’ Guardian
‘There are stories in this collection that expose the pain of growing up, or the lies within marriage, as well as anything written by anyone, anywhere…The finest collection of stories to appear in years.’ Scotsman
‘Means presents the perfect detail at the perfect time. He has a tender, but revealing grasp of human frailty and – that rare thing – a gift for finding and conveying dignity to his characters.’ A.L. Kennedy
‘An unsettling, fiercly felt debut collection. His prose can sometimes give you lives in single sentences. In its rigour and controlled sense of experiment, it is reminiscent of some of the best of the more singular American short story writers of the last few decades.’ Observer
‘We care for the characters as if we have known and loved and detested them forever…An exceptional book.’ Scotland on Sunday
‘The roll-call of honour, from Eudora Welty, to John Cheever, John Updike, William Maxwell, to Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff and Annie Proulx, is long and rich. Just when it seemed that things could get no better, along comes David Means.’ Irish Times
‘Extraordinary accomplished.’ Matt Thorne, Independent on Sunday
‘These are brittle, masculine stories of shifting surfaces and hard edges, true insight and tenderness.’ Daily Telegraph
Product Description
Wonderfully moving, these are important, generous stories; compassionate expressions of what can destroy, bewilder and console.
This is a tremendous collection from an hugely exciting author. These stories are bold, daring and generous and herald the arrival of one of America’s most talented writers.
From a married man consummating a hazy summer affair and getting lost in a reverie that explains the ‘far-away look in his eyes’ to a recently widowed woman who must decide what to do with the video of her honeymoon love-making, David Means probes the depths of the human heart. The stories are panoramic in scope and exhilirating in their narrative twists; a starving tramp interrupts a wedding reception in New York, altering the lives of all those who are present; a Depression-era hobo clings to the underside of a freight train as it roars through the desert night; a business executive sheds his shoes for an evening walk along the railway tracks and straight into the heart of darkness.
This is a writer who is willing to take a few risks. And through these risks he creates worlds of longing and tragedy; an impression of wholeness emerging through his characters’ scattered lives. Bound to attract critical praise, these tales delve deeper than most stories being published today.
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This collection of short stories is certainly one of the best that I've read. Means writes exceptional prose, something like Cormac McCarthy out of TC Boyle. The sentences and emotions are all lovingly crafted, and you can easily see why this won the Los Angeles Times book prize. Some of the images are lasting and very original - the eyes of a dead person refuse light, for instance. If there are a few too many dead people in the collection for everyone's taste, that does not mean that this is not a significant collection - likely to be among the best fiction published in the UK this year.
Format:Hardcover
David Means writes reflective, attenuated, rather alienated prose, mostly concerned with some of the more disaffected pockets of American life. Much of this is genuinely interesting and involving - the desperate hobo who gate-crashes a wedding party, the itinerant traveller who keeps a tenuous grip on a freight train for miles of desert track because he believes his mother's hands are holding him. Other stories are rather more alienating: the couple making illicit love while the man's wife is out of town; the story where the point is that nobody dies. In other stories people die, you see, so David Means wanted to write a story where no-one dies. A point hardly worth making when he is unwilling to give much attention to the making of it.
There is also the sense that these stories have been crafted, worked on, refined, designed and redesigned to the point where they sometimes desiccate. However, other stories are full of genuine life and its miseries; but this collection is nothing if not downbeat. One admires the writing too much to dismiss this out of hand, but one worries for such a deliberate paucity of even momentary happiness.
There is also the sense that these stories have been crafted, worked on, refined, designed and redesigned to the point where they sometimes desiccate. However, other stories are full of genuine life and its miseries; but this collection is nothing if not downbeat. One admires the writing too much to dismiss this out of hand, but one worries for such a deliberate paucity of even momentary happiness.
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
