Assorted Fire Events: Stories - Couverture souple

Adept and assured, David Means's stories are as perceptive as they are provocative, skillfully and startlingly sounding the depths of human emotion.

In Assorted Fire Events we find a major talent honing his skills, a gambler willing to push the limits while, at the same time, taking great care in playing his cards.

A married man carries on an affair with a neighbor, and suddenly his mind whisks him back to his brother's drowning. A recently widowed mother must decide what to do with a video of her honeymoon love-making.

A distraught businessman goes to the railroad tracks to find some sort of comfort and perhaps peace of mind, but finds the exact opposite in a group of young, miscreant men. Sneaking into a wedding reception, a homeless man forever changes the lives of all present. Suburban sprawl leads to disastrous consequences in the Pushcart Prize-winning "What They Did."

In prose that radiates in every direction, Assorted Fire Events exposes the human condition and explores the fragility of those things that we most cherish, establishing David Means as a tremendous new presence in contemporary American literature.

PRAISE FOR ASSORTED FIRE EVENTS
Astonishing . . . Each story possesses the density of detail, the social sweep
and force of a realist novel. . . . Dazzling, skillful narratives that enrich and deepen stories of lives that matter."-San Francisco Chronicle
[Means] has an uncompromising, humane vision that makes these stringent,
difficult stories almost unaccountably lovely."-The New York Times Book Review
David Means writes with sure-handed emotional intensity, conjuring brushfires
of the psyche in lushly sensual detail."-Entertainment Weekly