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Assorted Fire Events
 
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Assorted Fire Events (Hardcover)

by David Means (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Hardcover: 176 pages
  • Publisher: Fourth Estate Ltd (4 Mar 2002)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0007135068
  • ISBN-13: 978-0007135066
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 791,669 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Product Description

Review

'ASSORTED FIRE EVENTS is one of the best American collections of the last ten years. Means' stories are harrowing and funny and full-blooded, consistently satisfying in their narrative twists, and lyrical in a way that makes most contemporary literary 'lyricism' sound like greeting cards. This is food for the hungry.' Jonathan Franzen, author of THE CORRECTIONS 'An uncompromising, humane vision makes these stories almost unaccountably lovely.' New York Times Book Review 'A book that not only will educate short-story writers on the craft of the story for years to come but will also move present-day readers to surprising tears.' Los Angeles Times 'Incidents that might seem melodramatic in the hands of another writer lead instead to crystalline reflections on the limits of self-knowledge and the ways in which our past fails to define us.' New Yorker


Product Description

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, this collection of short stories probes the depths of the human heart.

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2 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.0 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A beautifully written assortment of life-changing stories, 5 Mar 2002
By A Customer
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.
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3.0 out of 5 stars Genuine life and its miseries, 18 Sep 2009
By E. Shaw "Kokoschka's_cat" (Leeds, England) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
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.
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