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Instructions for a Funeral
David Means
Stories
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
March 2019
On Sale: March 5, 2019
208 pages
ISBN: 0374279810
EAN: 9780374279813
Kindle: B07D6NGDZN
Hardcover / e-Book
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Literature and Fiction
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.
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