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Instructions for a funeral : stories / David Means.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019Copyright date: ©2019Edition: First editionDescription: 189 pages ; 22 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 9780374279813
  • 0374279810
Uniform titles:
  • Short stories. Selections
Contained works:
  • Means, David. Confessions
  • Means, David. Fistfight, Sacramento, August 1950
  • Means, David. Chair
  • Means, David. Terminal artist
  • Means, David. Fatherhood
  • Means, David. Farewell, my brother
  • Means, David. Mighty Shannon
  • Means, David. Instructions for a funeral
  • Means, David. Morro
  • Means, David. Butler's lament
Subject(s): Genre/Form:
Contents:
Confessions -- Fistfight, Sacramento, August 1950 -- The chair -- The terminal artist -- Fatherhood: three -- Farewell, my brother -- The mighty Shannon -- Instructions for a funeral -- El Morro -- The butler's lament -- The ice committee -- The tree line, Kansas, 1934 -- Carver & Cobain -- Two ruminations on a homeless brother.
Summary: "A collection of harrowing and personal stories by the O. Henry Prize-winning author David Means."
Fiction notes: Click to open in new window
Holdings
Item type Home library Collection Call number Materials specified Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Adult Book Adult Book Main Library Fiction Means, David Available 33111009133287
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

"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

Confessions -- Fistfight, Sacramento, August 1950 -- The chair -- The terminal artist -- Fatherhood: three -- Farewell, my brother -- The mighty Shannon -- Instructions for a funeral -- El Morro -- The butler's lament -- The ice committee -- The tree line, Kansas, 1934 -- Carver & Cobain -- Two ruminations on a homeless brother.

"A collection of harrowing and personal stories by the O. Henry Prize-winning author David Means."

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