David Means’s New Collection of Stories is Unstuck in Time

Before David Means published a single story, he was studying poetry in Columbia’s MFA program, taking classes with the late Denis Johnson. In a piece he wrote for The New Yorker, titled “Denis Johnson’s Lasting Advice“, Means recalls Johnson bumping into him in the hall, putting an arm around his shoulder, and pulling him close, saying, “Hang in there, buddy.” A few weeks later, Johnson leaned over a pile of Means’s poems and said, “You’ve got something. Just keep trusting yourself, keep listening to what you’re thinking, man.” Means—a writer from the Midwest whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, and The Paris Review—took Johnson’s advice. His stories have since drawn comparisons to those of a daunting list of greats: Flannery O’Connor, Alice Munro, and Raymond Carver, as well as Denis Johnson himself.

Much of Mean’s new collection, Instructions for a Funeral, takes place in New York’s Hudson Valley. In fourteen deeply internal stories, there is a great deal of pained reflection, much of it taking place alongside the “New World” Nile. Means has lived and worked in the Hudson Valley for decades; his home is in Nyack, and he teaches at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie. But Instructions also ventures to the middle of the country—Kansas, Detroit, Northern Michigan—in stories of a FBI sting gone wrong, a delusional factory worker medicated into state compliance, and a drifting pair of boatmen along Lake Superior. And it extends into the American West—Arizona, New Mexico, California—as Means writes about a wild