Assorted Fire Events: Stories

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This remarkable volume of stories, first published in 2000, lays out — in ways connected to what we might call, in the case of David Means’s work, authorial voice and attack — a new kind of territory, in which the physical world and the often dark and dreamlike states of being alive are merged. Means is unique, and he is a force — these stories are some of the strongest and most distinctive in our contemporary literature. Now they are being reissued, a gift for those already familiar with the work of David Means, as well as for readers coming to him for the very first time.

And just what is the territory that constitutes Means’s world? This is lonely America, the country found alongside abandoned train yards, or in the shadows of rusted factories, or on the quiet streets of Hudson River towns.

In Means’s America, a grieving man is kicked and beaten in a chance encounter with a group of young punks. Out of desperation, a woman shows her lover a honeymoon sex tape that she’d made with her late husband. A homeless man wanders into a wedding reception and changes the course of a marriage. A doctor questions the loss with age of his ability to diagnose his patients, or even himself: “Beneath him, life was giving way. Night was descending,” Means writes, and we know that this character inhabits and informs his creator, the writer in the act of finding and holding in mind his own amazement or exaltation over life.

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