Readers familiar with David Means' electrifying work in the Los Angeles Times Book Prize -- winning Assorted Fire Eventswill recognize his extraordinary vision in The Secret Goldfish. A trio of erotically charged kids goes on a crime spree in Michigan; a goldfish bears witness to the demise of a Connecticut marriage; and an extremely unlucky man is stalked by lightning. This dazzling new collection reveals Means' rare talent for the short story and establishes his place among the American masters.

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'.

"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

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.

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.