Instructions for a Funeral
Stories
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"Poetic, insightful, and deeply moving. David Means is one of my very favorite writers." —Tara Westover, author of Educated
Following the publication of his widely acclaimed, Man Booker-nominated novel Hystopia, David Means here returns to his signature form: the short story. Thanks to his four previous story collections, Means has won himself an international reputation as one of the most innovative short fiction writers working today: an “established master of the form.” (Laura Miller, The Guardian). Instructions for a Funeral—featuring work from The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Paris Review, and VICE—finds Means branching out beyond the explorations of violence and trauma with which he is often identified, prominently displaying his sly humor and his inimitable way of telling tales that deliciously wind up to punch the reader in the heart. With each story Means pushes into new territory, writing with tenderness and compassion about fatherhood, marriage, a homeless brother, the nature of addiction, and the death of a friend at the hands of a serial-killer nurse. Means transmutes a fistfight in Sacramento into a tender, life-long love story; two FBI agents on a stakeout in the 1920s into a tale of predator and prey, paternal urges and loss; a man’s funeral instructions into a chronicle of organized crime, real estate ventures, and the destructive force of paranoia.
Means’s work has earned him comparisons to Flannery O’Connor, Alice Munro, Sherwood Anderson, Denis Johnson, Edgar Allan Poe, Anton Chekhov, and Raymond Carver but his place in the American literary landscape is fully and originally his own.
"David Means is a master of tense, distilled, quintessentially American prose. Like any artist who has finely honed his talent to its strongest expression he is a brilliant craftsman whose achievement is to appear unstudied, even casual . . . Each story by Means which I have read is unlike the others, unexpected and an unnerving delight." —Joyce Carol Oates
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
For 30 years, Means (Hystopia) has examined the ways in which violence embeds trauma that warps the American character. This superb new collection covers similar geographic, characterological, and thematic ground, yet finds Means at his most compassionate and mischievous. In the title story, a man directs every last detail of his own send-off ("Please tilt the coffin slightly toward the room so that a view of my body is unavoidable.") in a letter that doubles as a tale of betrayal foretold. Often, stories contain told tales, creating an aura of oral history. In the wonderfully digressive "The Ice Committee," a Vietnam vet tries to tell a story he's already told to a man who's already heard it, about a story he once told someone else. In the gripping "El Morro," a dreamer holds two women captive from northern California to New Mexico with his ceaseless mania. Characters in "Fistfight, Sacramento, August 1950" and "The Tree Line, Kansas, 1934" interrogate explosions of violence with the attention to detail of the obsessed. What Means writes about his dying father in the autofictional "Confessions" aptly describes his own distinct style of storytelling: "He is consumed in the vortex of the moment." Means spins intricate, highly textured yarns with great artistry, care, and an acute, empathetic eye. Treasures abound.
