Assorted Fire Events
Stories
ISBN10: 0865478872
ISBN13: 9780865478879
Trade Paperback
192 Pages
$16.00
CA$22.00
Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner
National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee
This collection of stories by the Pushcart Prize winner introduces readers to a colorful cast of characters as they struggle with personal epiphanies and moments of fate.
Reviews
Praise for Assorted Fire Events
"Achingly intelligent . . . With his jump-cut shifts, startling connections and breathtaking disconnections, the author stands among our most gifted younger writers. Distinctively, though, he anneals his cutting-edge irony into a compassionate anger that goes beyond the literary times. In a word he might disdain to use, it is timeless." —Richard Eder, The New York Times
"Assorted Fire Events is one of the best American collections of the last ten years. Means's 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 Freedom
"The roll-call of honor, 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 seems that things could get no better, along comes David Means." —Eileen Batersby, The Irish Times
"It is Means's signature talent to view the lives of his characters, and life itself, from somewhere just beyond, in a position of maximum understanding and honorable detachment: a semidivine vantage point for the examination of hopelessly human affairs." —Jeffrey Eugenides, author of The Marriage Plot
Reviews from Goodreads
BOOK EXCERPTS
Read an Excerpt
Assorted Fire Events
RAILROAD INCIDENT, AUGUST 1995
THE DECLIVITY where he sat to rest was part of a railroad bed blasted out of the hard shale and lime deposits cut by the Hudson River, which was just down the hill, out...
About the author
David Means; Foreword by Donald Antrim
RELATED
The New York Times: A Writer Who Finds Grace Beneath the Violence in His Stories