- Hardcover: 176 pages
- Publisher: Faber and Faber Inc; 1 edition (5 July 2010)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0865479127
- ISBN-13: 978-0865479128
- Product Dimensions: 21.7 x 16.8 x 1.9 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,400,335 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
It was with the collection "Assorted Fire Events" that an unknown writer named David Means took critics by surprise, won a "Los Angeles Times" Book Prize, and established an international reputation. In this new collection of stories from "The New Yorker", "Harper's Magazine', and "Zoetrope", all of his considerable powers are on display. Means moves with ease from an adulterous affair in Manhattan to the philosophical intricacies of a failed bank robbery to a young prostitute's quasi-biblical plight. Offering, as the critic James Wood has put it, 'an exquisitely precise and sensuous register of an often crazy American reality', Means' stories chart the physics and geography of crime and betrayal with a Dostoevskian fervour, seeking out the intricate relationship between immorality and grace.
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6 reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Another good collection from David Means
17 Jun 2010
Format:Hardcover
The Spot is David Means's fourth collection of stories, and he continues to write strongly about men, vagrants, and small time charlatans with a subdued grace that is mature and skilled and interesting. His midwestern stories and rural New York stories are all very good. Two of three of his NYC stories seemed out of place (Knocking, River in Egypt), while his third NYC story (Reading Chekov), despite lacking the direct midwestern and rural tones, still came across, to me, very nicely. That said, David is a superb short story writer and this collection is very well written and was definitely worth the wait.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Brilliant Fiction
3 Dec 2010
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Means is the kind of writer who never flinches, who actually tells stories you want to hear, and who gets better and better from book to book. "A River in Egypt," is the best story I've ever read about fatherhood. Love and compassion combined with the need to help and feeling, at times helpless. In the story, a father, has to hold his son during a medical test. The story weaves in and out of time, and gives a complete picture of a man's life, his situation, and his fear, and his desire for grace. This isn't a corny story. It's not a confession. It's not a silly light picture of parenthood. Means refuses to go easy. These stories are about looking for a sense of family, drifting on the American road, crimes--bank robberies, drug dealing--but they're much more than that because Means has compassion, the kind that makes you look closely at things you might not want to see, but things that are around us all the time. In "The Spot" Means tells the story of a girl who is lost in the world, selling herself--he pans back and shows the evil forces at work, and then in this unique cinimatic manner shifts the story to a man in the boat, trying to make sense of the world. Not a single cheap thrill. The story stunned me when I read it in "The New Yorker," and stunned me again this time. Maybe it's a cliche, but these are stories to savor. "The Knocking" another New Yorker story, is exactly that, a story about New Yorker, a great evocation of the kind of madness you get in the city. You can hear it on Selected Shorts. Means has been compared again and again to Raymond Carver and Alice Munro, but he really has his own style and voice.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Intense, humane, and pitch perfect
15 July 2010
Format:Hardcover
David Means packs more in five pages than most writers do in five books, and nowhere is this sublime narrative economy more on display than in his new collection, The Spot. His stories track the sorrows of the empire wilderness, the anatomy of sudden violence, the retreat into self in the face of trauma. They're also entertaining, thoughtful, and heartbreaking. No one else writes like David Means, and any serious student of fiction should be familiar with his work.
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