Annotation
Upon its publication, Assorted Fire Events won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, and received tremendous critical praise. Ranging across America, taking in a breathtaking array of voices and experiences, this story collection now stands as one of the finest of our time.
David Means
FOREWORD BY DONALD ANTRIM
RAILROAD INCIDENT, AUGUST 1995
COITUS
WHAT THEY DID
SLEEPING BEAR LAMENT
THE REACTION
THE GRIP
WHAT I HOPE FOR
THE INTERRUPTION
THE WIDOW PREDICAMENT
TAHORAH
THE GESTURE HUNTER
ASSORTED FIRE EVENTS
THE WOODCUTTER
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PRAISE FOR ASSORTED FIRE EVENTS
NOTES
David Means
Assorted Fire Events: Stories
To Genève
FOREWORD BY DONALD ANTRIM
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.
Here, from “Coitus”—a story that only seems to be about a love affair — is a bit of the world as Means both sees and makes it: “The noon whistle breaks open and you can hear it spreading over the shimmer of the Hudson, the tide drawing in from the sea, the deep-cut river licking the Atlantic, the Atlantic licking up beneath the bridge now, the sound haunting along the other side, cresting over the hills that you see when you’re at the window of their room, French doors thrown open to a small tarred roof. ” This description might be called painterly. But the painting is fractured and tragic. The descending and fully concrete imagery carries us, to the shrill music of a factory whistle, from the deep and open expansiveness of ocean and river to the private realm of French doors, and is characteristic of Means’s writing, his technique. The stories in Assorted Fire Events seem almost to emerge from the page, unwinding themselves into associative, incantatory strands of emotional monologue and (only apparent) digression into serpentine memory, building narrative power and a complexity that the author and his characters (and the willing reader), all working together, as it were, recognize as a kind of logic — even if lasting only a moment — a logic that both produces and expresses Means’s acute understanding of the meanings and consequences of living and of loving. And it is toward this psychological logic — toward fate — that the stories drive.
