David Means

At the bitter end of the 1960s, after surviving multiple assassination attempts, President John F. Kennedy has created a vast federal agency, the Psych Corps, dedicated to maintaining the nations mental hygiene by any means necessary. Soldiers returning from Vietnam have their battlefield traumas "enfolded"-wiped from their memories through drugs and therapy-while veterans too damaged to be enfolded roam at will in Michigan, evading the Psych Corps and reenacting atrocities on civilians.This destabilized, alternate version of American history is the vision of the twenty-two-year-old veteran Eugene Allen, who has returned from Vietnam to write the book at the center of Hystopia, the long-awaited first novel by David Means. In Hystopia, Means brings his full talent to bear on the crazy reality of trauma, both national and personal. Outlandish and tender, funny and violent, timely and historical, Hystopia invites us to consider whether our traumas can ever be truly overcome. The answers it offers are wildly inventive, deeply rooted in its characters, and wrung from the authors own heart.

THE SPOT is an old blacksmith shed in which a gang of men tweeze apart the intricacies of a botched bank robbery. THE SPOT is a place deep in Riverside Park, along the Hudson River, where two lovers walk with a keen sense that their adultery 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 tangled currents of her own tragic story. THE SPOT is a place in a young fathers mind where love, fear and responsibility merge in the struggle with his sons potentially devastating diagnosis. THE SPOT lies in the eardrum of a madman plagued by a noisy upstairs neighbour on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. This highly anticipated collection by internationally acclaimed short story master David Means is exceptional not only in its language but also in the diversity of the narratives, as he searches out with delicate precision the intricate relationship between immortality and grace.

Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles. In his masterful story A River in Egypt, David Means paints a portrait of a moment. Cavanaugh and his young son are suspended; trapped in what a nurse calls the sweat chamber, where the boy will be tested for cystic fibrosis.Cavanaugh has brought distractions - spasmodic action figures, malformed toy trucks - but they do little to alter the frustration of the sick child screaming, or to alleviate the anxiety of the time spent waiting for some exactitude in the form of a diagnosis.

After winning international acclaim with his first novel, the Man Booker-nominated Hystopia, David Means returns to the form that made his name in Instructions for a Funeral, a collection of fourteen masterful stories that run the gamut from the playful to the personal. The Terminal Artist, originally published in Vice, skirts reportage in grappling with the revelation that the death of a hospitalized loved one was in fact a murder; The Tree Line, Kansas, 1934, from the New Yorker, is a wry anatomy of the moments before an FBI raid goes spectacularly wrong; while The Chair, from The Paris Review, gives us a clear-eyed look at fatherhood, with all its paradoxes, recriminations, and rewards gloriously intact. Meanss work has earned him comparisons to Flannery OConnor, Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Denis Johnson, Poe, Chekhov, and Carver - but his place in the American literary landscape is fully and originally his own.

En el retorcido mundo de «Histopía», en la década de los setenta, John F. Kennedy no ha muerto, sino que aún es presidente tras haber sobrevivido a seis intentos de asesinato, y el gobierno de los Es

In his masterful story 'A River in Egypt', David Means paints a portrait of a moment. Cavanaugh and his young son are suspended; trapped in what a nurse calls 'the sweat chamber', where the boy will be tested for cystic fibrosis. Cavanaugh has brought distractions - spasmodic action figures, malformed toy trucks - but they do little to alter the frustration of the sick child screaming, or to alleviate the anxiety of the time spent waiting for 'some exactitude in the form of a diagnosis'.

En el retorcido mundo de «Histopía», en la década de los setenta, John F. Kennedy no ha muerto, sino que aún es presidente tras haber sobrevivido a seis intentos de asesinato, y el gobierno de los Es

En esta prodigiosa colección de cuentos –unas narraciones intrincadas, fascinantes, profundamente poéticas y emotivas que confirman a su autor como uno de los mejores escritores de su país–, Means re

Con Instrucciones para un funeral, David Means regresa por todo lo alto al género que cimentó su prestigio literario: el relato. En esta prodigiosa colección de cuentos–unas narraciones intrincadas,

Incendios presenta una serie de historias peculiares, extrañas y hermosas, todas ellas con un trasfondo universal. «Incendios contiene relatos clásicos, hermosos, deslumbrantes. Means es heredero de