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The Spot is an old blacksmith shed in which three men tweeze apart the intricacies of a botched bank robbery.
The Spot is a park on the Hudson River, where two lovers sense their affair is about to come to an end.
The Spot is at the bottom of Niagara Falls, where the body of a young girl floats as if caught in the currents of her own tragic story.
The Spot is in the ear of a Manhattan madman plagued by a noisy upstairs neighbor .
The Spot is a suburban hospital room in which a young father confronts his son's potentially devastating diagnosis.
The Spot is a dusty encampment in Nebraska where a gang of inept radicals plot a revolution.
The Spot draws thirteen new stories together into a masterful collection that shows David Means at his finest: at once comically detached and wrenchingly affecting, expansive and concise, wildly inventive and firmly rooted in tradition. Means's work has earned him comparisons to Flannery O'Connor (London Review of Books), Alice Munro, Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac (Newsday), Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson (Chicago Tribune/NPR), Denis Johnson (Entertainment Weekly), Poe, Chekhov, and Carver (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel), but the spot he has staked out in the American literary landscape is fully and originally his own.
- Sales Rank: #340717 in Books
- Published on: 2011-06-21
- Released on: 2011-06-21
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.24" h x .49" w x 5.48" l, .36 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 176 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. A natural storyteller, Means (The Secret Goldfish) presents 13 nuanced tales of wanderlust and transgression. Hoboes around a campfire spin elaborate yarns in two of the richest stories, offering just enough confession to keep the others' interest: The Blade finds an improbable friendship between an old geezer and a young junkie, culminating in a requisite blade-to-the-throat story; while The Junction pursues a vagrant who begs food at a farmhouse that is strikingly similar to the home he grew up in. The American landscape is vividly sketched in these tales, traversed by the Bonnie-and-Clyde meets Charles Starkweather team of young bank robbers in Nebraska, and the manipulative con man of Oklahoma. Similarly, the title story details a jaunty pimp's shameless exploitation of a girl with a horrific past, culminating in a grim discovery at Niagara Falls. There's not an off note to be found in Means's prose, and he proves to be remarkably adept at locating the sublime in the unseemly. (June)
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From Booklist
In three previous collections, Means proved himself a master of the short form, earning comparisons to O'Connor and Carver for his tight, energetic sentences. The 13 luminous stories in his fourth collection are just as strong. Here Means articulates the impulsiveness of angst-driven loners, including the homeless who've lost their faith in others and drifters whose only means of survival is their tale, whether true or otherwise. In the title story, a pimp, schooled in the Bible and disguised as a Northern Michigan farmer, tells a client about a girl whose drowning was his fault, and whose father followed her body to Niagara Falls. A group of hoboes swap stories involving knives until one man's silence betrays his refusal to reveal the tale of revenge that brought him to this place. A man assuming the worst for his ailing son wraps up his son's old toys and arranges an early Christmas. Darkly comic and rich in language and drama, Means' cerebral tales are astute, amusing, and companionable. --Jonathan Fullmer
Review
“Means is more than a conventionally accomplished realistic story writer. As I've written before in these pages, his fiction sometimes skitters up to the borderline of legend . . . he can produce work that holds up even in comparison with his most gifted ancestors like Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway, employing some of the most sharp-edged and beautifully spare language of any writer of his generation. The stories in ‘The Spot' show him working at the top of his powers . . . With this new collection readers with a taste for high art in the short story will want to place him up there with writers such as Evan Connell, James Salter, and, from a slightly younger generation, Tobias Wolff and Richard Ford.” ―Alan Cheuse, The Chicago Tribune
“David Means revives the American short story in this quietly compelling collection about adulterous Manhattanites, violent train-yard drifters, pensive madmen, and concerned fathers. It's as if the works of Poe and Kerouac had been rewritten by Cheever.” ―Details
“Each story is a reminder of why people break, and an uncomfortable revelation that we are all closer to breaking than we think.” ―Esquire
“His book is dark, deep and dangerous. Here, the author's technical authority continues to astonish. He'll switch point of view midstory or examine the act of storytelling while telling a tale that you actually want to read. His most typical pieces, at once shadowy and insanely focused, feature bleak Midwestern violence: the crucifixion of a high-school boy, or the murder of a farmer by a hooker. Others bend time until it becomes as complex as the characters themselves . . . Virtuosic.” ―Leigh Newman, TimeOut New York
“The stories by Means (The Secret Goldfish, 2004, etc.) defy categorization. There are 15 of them in this slim volume, a couple as short as a (long) paragraph, yet they resist the tag of ‘minimalism.' Instead, they are dense with detail, character and theme, and they connect in some surprising ways that aren't immediately apparent. The stories within the stories, like the fiction of Means through which they are framed, often have an archetypal quality transcending the characters (many unnamed), as if something immutable in the human condition keeps repeating itself: ‘The story would end and then it would just keep going, the way this one does.' Though the author teaches at Vassar, these stories have a lot more punch and life than academic, creative-writing exercises.” ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“In three previous collections, Means proved himself a master of the short form, earning comparisons to O'Connor and Carver for his tight, energetic sentences. The 13 luminous stories in his fourth collection are just as strong. Here Means articulates the impulsiveness of angst-driven loners, including the homeless who've lost their faith in others and drifters whose only means of survival is their tale, whether true or otherwise. In the title story, a pimp, schooled in the Bible and disguised as a Northern Michigan farmer, tells a client about a girl whose drowning was his fault, and whose father followed her body to Niagara Falls. A group of hoboes swap stories involving knives until one man's silence betrays his refusal to reveal the tale of revenge that brought him to this place. A man assuming the worst for his ailing son wraps up his son's old toys and arranges an early Christmas. Darkly comic and rich in language and drama, Means' cerebral tales are astute, amusing, and companionable.” ―Jonathan Fullmer, Booklist
“Every reader has a comfort zone. When an author breaks that boundary, the reader is forced to come to terms with the limits of their own adventurous nature. If it sounds as though David Means's newest collection of short stories, The Spot, forced me into my own literary panic room--if it sounds as though I'm fighting for some sense of ownership over these stories--well, it did, and I am. Means was put on earth to frustrate creative writing teachers and John Gardner evangelists: His characters don't change. A lot of his action happens in flashback. His violence borders on the grotesque. He can take or leave paragraphs as structural units of composition. And he rarely, if ever, allows for immersion into fiction's ‘vivid and continuous dream.' Yet to read The Spot is to understand that these rules were made to be broken--or, in Means's case, to be pistol whipped, dragged into a quarry, shot twice in the head, and set on fire.” ―The Rumpus
Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Another good collection from David Means
By N. Johnson
The Spot is David Means's fourth collection of stories, and he continues to write strongly about men, vagrants, and small time charlatans with a subdued grace that is mature and skilled and interesting. His midwestern stories and rural New York stories are all very good. Two of three of his NYC stories seemed out of place (Knocking, River in Egypt), while his third NYC story (Reading Chekov), despite lacking the direct midwestern and rural tones, still came across, to me, very nicely. That said, David is a superb short story writer and this collection is very well written and was definitely worth the wait.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Intense, humane, and pitch perfect
By Mr. Books
David Means packs more in five pages than most writers do in five books, and nowhere is this sublime narrative economy more on display than in his new collection, The Spot. His stories track the sorrows of the empire wilderness, the anatomy of sudden violence, the retreat into self in the face of trauma. They're also entertaining, thoughtful, and heartbreaking. No one else writes like David Means, and any serious student of fiction should be familiar with his work.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Spot On
By Chris Lopez
David means latest collection (his 4th) of short stories, "The Spot," is spot on. I've been a fan of Mean's work for years and was exceedingly delighted when I learned that this new collection was coming out. Exceptional short story writers are rare indeed -- there's not the market for them that there is for novels -- but Means is one of the best working today. He packs more into a six page short story than most contemporary novelists can fit into 300+ pages. You know he's good, because his stories are the kind that you want to read again and again. I just finished "The Spot," and I've already begun reading it again from the beginning, plus I plan on returning to his earlier collections soon.
Being a native of Michigan my favorite stories are the ones that are about or at least reference the state, but they are all good. A stronger collection I have not read in some time.
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