The Secret Goldfish: Stories - Hardcover

Means, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0007164890 ISBN 13: 9780007164899

Publisher: Harper, 2004

Synopsis

It is a less and less well-kept secret that David Means is one of our best fiction writers. In the past few years he has won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and received critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. Readers familiar with Means's electrifying work will recognize the vision at play in The Secret Goldfish -- a trio of erotically charged kids go on a crime spree in Michigan; a goldfish bears witness to the demise of a Connecticut marriage; an extremely unlucky man is stalked by lightning -- but this new work is funnier, more generous, and bigger in its reach.

Each story stands on its own, and yet linked together they produce a quintessentially American experience -- not the stars-and-stripes-on-the-bumper-sticker kind, but the stoned-and-bored-and-looking-for-trouble kind. Means's writing is shot through with emotion and beauty. A subversive humor -- and an almost religious fervor -- drives these stories, and Means's miraculously precise observations bring them to life.

Eileen Battersby of the Irish Times wrote, "The roll-call of honor, from Eudora Welty to John Cheever, John Updike, William Maxwell, to Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, and Annie Proulx is long and rich. Just when it seems that things could get no better, along comes David Means." This is a brilliant lineage, and yet David Means writes like no one but himself.

About this title

About the Author:

David Means is the author of A Quick Kiss of Redemption and The Secret Goldfish. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Short Stories. He lives in Nyack, New York, and teaches at Vassar College.

From Publishers Weekly:

The characters in this imaginative and penetrating story collection—a man hounded by lightning strikes, a driver blown off the Mackinac bridge, a pianist whose fingers stop working, a woman who slaughters her boyfriend after ambiguous consultations with Jesus and the devil, a bog man roused from his shallow grave—are beset by bolts from the blue. Sometimes the victims and sometimes the perpetrators of calamity, they struggle to extract meaning—and the occasional glimpses of grace and beauty—from the chaos and brutality that disrupt their lives. Means, author of the acclaimed story collection Assorted Fire Events, probes a broad range of social registers, from junkies and criminals festering in the postindustrial decay of northern Michigan's iron range to the chilly adulteries of the artsy New York haute bourgeoisie, linking them into a bleak, sometimes apocalyptic panorama of the precariousness of life in a country that "could eat anything, absolutely anything, up." His uncompromising vision rarely indulges anything more comforting than harsh poetic epiphanies, inexplicable moments of clarity gleaned from random encounters with destruction; the story "Michigan Death Trip," a litany of demise from nonnatural causes, is emblematic of the book's sensibility. But every so often, as with the titular goldfish who endures, and even prevails, when his tank is neglected by a family in the throes of divorce, a happy ending slips through.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Harper
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0007164890
• ISBN 13: 9780007164899
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224