Chapters: Instructions for a Funeral: Stories by David Means January 2025
Instructions for a Funeral by David Means January 14th at 7:15
Instructions for a Funeral by ISBN: 9780374279813Publication Date: 2019-03-05"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
About the Author
David Means received an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. He is the author six short story collections, including, most recently, Instructions for a Funeral (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019). His first novel, Hystopia, was nominated for the Mann Booker Prize. His previous books include Assorted Fire Events, which won the Los Angeles Book Prize for Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Spot, which was a New York Times Notable Book, and The Secret Goldfish, which was a finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize. His new collection is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. His stories appear frequently in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, The Paris Review, and Zoetrope. He has been the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes, three Pushcart Prizes, and his work has been selected for The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Mystery Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. His non-fiction has appeared in Harper’s and The New York Times. His first non-fiction book, Pivot: Ruminations in the Shadow of Death, is forthcoming from FSG. Means was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013. His teaching interest include creative writing, modern and contemporary fiction and poetry, and American culture. His personal interests include jazz, pop and indie music, film, graphic novels, and contemporary art.
Videos with the author
Articles and Reviews
- Instructions for a Funeral by David Means review – love, loss and fistfightsThe Guardian
M John Harrison
5 Apr 2019
- David Means, Defender Of The Short Story, On His 'Instructions For A Funeral'From: All Things Considered
Publisher: National Public Radio, Inc. (NPR)
Mar. 6, 2019
- A Writer Who Finds Grace Beneath the Violence in His StoriesNew York Times
By Justin Taylor
March 10, 2019