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Means stares straight into the parts of life we prefer to leave in the dark, and this collection is a haunting, beautiful result of that bravery. I picked up this collection of short stories after reading Means’ story “Two Nurses, Smoking” in the New Yorker a couple weeks ago. This collection feels like “Two Nurses”’s divorced uncle. The stories are driven by the same obsessions with loneliness, imperfect love, and blue-gray, semi-abandoned small towns on the Hudson River. However, while “Two Nu...
2007 notebook: 1st story is so kick-ass you have to put it down and take a breath. Other stories not as good, good but wandering, too self-conscious for me at times (eg he dismisses a character: we won't hear from her again).
Grad school fiction about deep things like Vietnam and death.
An interesting exploration of where you can take short stories in terms of point of view, structure etc. It felt a little forced at times, though; A literary experimentation; An opportunity for the writer to demonstrate how unique, quirky and elegant his characters' view of the world was (although if/once I was in their heads it all felt too similar in tone and eloquence and failed to allow me to engage with the character on the emotional level). Most of the stories somehow left me feeling dissa...
Every time I finish one of these David Means collections I just want to run up and down the street screaming DAVID MEANS over and over until I get arrested and maybe people look him up to see what the big deal was
#1Again a faint breeze came. He moved forward along the tracks, leaving a pad print full of blood behind him on each tie. Ahead of him the tracks curved farther into the darkness; to his left and overhead, the steel girders and chutes of the stoneworks.#6The night took on vast, grand proportions; the night was liquid and runny, stretched taut until it was no more than a thin strand of hot white burning his foot and palm.
More serious subjects than I usually like to read but still interesting.
In Assorted Fire Events David Means seems to have found the perfect balance--at least to my taste--of story with mild postmodern/experimental textual flairs here and there. For example, in two of the short pieces in the collection, "What They Did," and "The Woodcutter," he writes without paragraph breaks; he employs footnotes in "The Interruption," and in the footnotes in "Assorted Fire Events" he plays on the reader's expectations of fact and fiction (similar to Tim O'brien's novel, In the Lake...
Since hearing his Goldfish story I've been looking for books by him. It was worth the wait. This guy can write. Not much dialog though. Deaths figure in many of the stories. He can zoom in on actionbut he's not a 'here and now' writer. He's happy to start a story with a journalistic info-dump. His endings are open - sometime formally soThe characters hoard special moments - not so much epiphanies (though sometimes dying people figure), more often mundane events, an everyday substitute for the s
I know this deserves more than 2 stars, but that what it's got. Frankly, it's just not my kind of book. Not enough inner turmoil or angst or dread for me. Did I say that? I mean, it's there--it just didn't move me.This is my first David Means book, and the cover practically sold itself, on top of the fact that I'd wanted to read a short story collection about a series of fires. (Seriously, I feel like I manifested this out of thin air.) So I put it on my Amazon Wish List. And Santa gave it to m...
It begins with two words: "THE DECLIVITY..." and in the stark brutality of those capitals - one word small and common, the other strange, self-consciously artful in its unfamiliarity - the reader feels the beads of sweat prinking into glistening existence on his soon-to-be-furrowed brow, for by those two words and those two words alone, he knows he is in the grip of Great American Literature: remorseless and unforgiving in its brooding power drawn from the primeval heart of that young, dark cont...
Current read. Mixed feelings. I figured I was overdue for some fiction and opted for this book of short stories, acclaimed as one of the best in recent times. Tbh I'm not sure I agree. The author certainly knows how to paint a picture, but his writing style, full of long sentences that just keep going like streams of words burbling and cascading on and on, piling description upon description, gets a bit tiresome. So does the repeated theme of death, which combined with this meandering, melanchol...
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