Review by Booklist Review
Vulnerability and loss permeate Means' (Instructions for a Funeral, 2019) story collection. The title tale divulges the dialogue between two nurses during their smoke breaks. The woman assists with a lithotripsy machine that uses ultrasound to pulverize kidney stones. The man is an emotionally and physically scarred military veteran and ER nurse. Their conversations kindle a physical attraction and then something larger as they navigate pain, sorrow, and intimacy. The other standout tale, "Stopping Distance," is similar in its fragmentary style and themes. It zooms in on a bereavement group meeting in a church basement and features a father who lost his teenage daughter and a mother whose son has passed. The story potently parses grief: how it is packaged (from small bits to immense quantities), shared, generates guilt, and lingers. Other tales showcase a lost dachshund weighing its new freedom against the desire for rescue and reunion, a girl in a psychiatric hospital, and two young hippies taking pleasure in drug trips. Infidelity, self-deception, and the volatility of memory are on display; so are commiseration, grace, and connection.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Means (Instructions for a Funeral) explores the parameters of existence in his dazzling latest. In the title story, two nurses trade war stories over break--one's about a doomed junkie dubbed Kidney Boy, another about a serial killer fellow nurse--and discover their capacity for love in each other. "Lightning Speaks!" is a hodgepodge of chatter centering on a teenage runaway adrift in the 1960s counterculture movement, while "The Red Dot" recalls the testament of a divorced man who regards the strange apparition of his water-averse ex-wife emerging from a river as a portent. "Stopping Distance" unspools from a bereavement support group, and "Vows" follows the second life of a marriage following a betrayal. In "Clementine, Carmelita, Dog," a canine describes her memories and experiences while passing from one owner to another. The lovely closer, "The Depletion Prompts," takes the form of a series of recursive writing prompts, an eminently teachable Barthian meditation that spells out Means's interest in "the failure of language to reclaim pain," as described in a prompt to write about the "strange dynamic between the past and the present." Readers will revel in this robust collection. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Sept.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
In six stories set mostly in central New York State, Natural History revisits the family of scientists, teachers, and innovators the expansive Barrett has featured regularly since her National Book Award-winning collection Ship Fever. From passengers quarantined while on cruise to a woman explaining to her barstool companion that she has ESP to a hyena loose in the south of France, I Walk Between the Raindrops shows off the award-winning Boyle's trenchant prose (50,000-copy first printing). In Bliss Montage, NYPL Young Lion Ma (Severance) reveals the absurdism of the everyday through push-the-envelope stories featuring a woman living with all her former boyfriends, relationships based on an invisibility drug, and the idea that burying oneself alive can cure all manner of ills (75,000-copy first printing). From prolific, icepick-exact short story writer Means, a Pushcart and O. Henry honoree, Two Nurses, Smoking explores grief and survival in pieces ranging from two nurses exchanging quiet support in a parking lot to a couple reuniting on the ski slopes after having met in a bereavement group.
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
There's nothing quite like a David Means story. Jangly, elliptical, apparently autobiographical in some sense (but maybe not), his work functions like a series of Russian nesting dolls, one layer leading inexorably to the next. The 10 pieces in his sixth collection--he is also the author of the novel Hystopia (2016)--begin with small scenes, anecdotal encounters: the hospital workers in the title story, "somewhat lonely-looking figures, taking a smoke break, back behind a trailer, leaning toward each other as they talked softly beside a row of neatly trimmed bushes"; the man in the grief encounter group "who lost his teenage daughter two years ago, chasing after a Frisbee into the road." Means is a genius of the fragment: Some of the narratives here include subtitled sections, a strategy that recalls "Two Ruminations on a Homeless Brother," which appeared in Instructions for a Funeral (2019). But even those that don't work this way build their effects incrementally, moving back and forth from the action to the reflective eye of the narrator, who bears a striking resemblance to the author himself. Means makes this clear from the opening story, "Clementine, Carmelita, Dog," which he narrates from the perspective of a canine even as he acknowledges the challenges of doing so. "I wish I could make words be dog," he writes, "…find the way to inhabit the true dynamic, to imagine a world not defined by notions of power, or morality, or memory, or sentiment, but instead by pure instinct." What he's addressing are the limitations of literature as well as its possibilities. This conundrum sits at the center of this remarkable set of stories, which seek to destabilize the illusions of fiction even as they embrace and heighten them. How does he do it? Let's call it presence, both that of the characters and of the writer, whose language lives and grows by such an interplay. "Do your best to be as specific as possible while also bending around the truth so as to protect the living," he implores in "The Depletion Prompts." These brilliant stories exist in the space between desire and complication. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
