David Means
David Means is an American short story writer and novelist based in Nyack, New York. His stories have appeared in many publications, including Esquire, The New Yorker, and Harper's. They are frequently set in the Midwest or the Rust Belt, or along the Hudson River in New York.
Biography
Born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Means graduated from Loy Norrix High School in 1980. He received his bachelor's degree in 1984 from the College of Wooster, where his I.S. was "Bullfighting in Boston and other Poems". He went to graduate school at Columbia University, where he received an MFA in poetry. He has been a part-time member of the English department at Vassar College since 2001. Means is married with two children.Work
Contemporary Authors writes: "With Means's second collection, Assorted Fire Events: Stories, he was compared favorably to such esteemed writers as Raymond Carver and Alice Munro and praised by critics for his sharp prose." James Wood, in The London Review of Books notes that "Means' language offers an exquisitely precise and sensuous register of an often crazy American reality. Sentences gleaming with lustre are sewn through the stories. One will go a long way with a writer possessed of such skill. You can hear the influence of Flannery O'Connor in Means' prose: in the scintillating shiver of the beautiful imagery, in the lack of sentimentality, in the interest in grotesque violence, and gothic tricksterism." Eileen Battersby in The Irish Times has compared Means' work to that of Eudora Welty and John Cheever.His first novel is Hystopia. It was long listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2016.
Novels
- Hystopia
Short fiction
- A Quick Kiss of Redemption
- Assorted Fire Events
- The Secret Goldfish
- The Spot
- Instructions for a Funeral
| Title | Year | First published | Reprinted/collected | Notes |
| The knocking | 2010 | |||
| Two ruminations on a homeless brother | 2017 | |||
| Two Nurses, Smoking | 2020 | Published online May 25, 2020 |
- "Stories I Used to Write," The Paris Review, No. 137, Winter 1995
- "Disclaimer," The Paris Review, No. 143, Summer 1997
- "Elective Mute," Esquire, February 2007
- "Wait for Walk," Abitare, May, 2008
- "Tree Line, Kansas," The New Yorker, October 25, 2010
- "The Butler's Lament," Zoetrope, Spring 2011
- "El Morro," The New Yorker, August 29, 2011
- "The Chair," The Paris Review, No. 200, Spring 2012
- "Farewell, My Brother," Zoetrope, Fall 2012
- Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, "Found" Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts, edited by David Shields and Matthew Vollmer, W. W. Norton, 2012
Awards
- Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Assorted Fire Events
- National Book Critics Circle Award for Assorted Fire Events
- The Pushcart Prize
- O. Henry Prize for "Sault Ste. Marie"
- Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award for The Secret Goldfish
- O. Henry Prize for "The Junction"