The Secret Goldfish - Hardcover

David Means was born and raised in Michigan. He now lives in Nyack, New York with his wife and twins.

"Means' stories meld literary influences from diverse traditions: mainstream writers like Alice Munro and Beat voices like Jack Kerouac. Mix in the impact of singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan, and the resulting fiction is uniquely Means' own-an innovative approach to form, an eerie, somber tone and characters so out of place in American society they seem disposable." Newsday "Aims toward a mythology of the modern heartland...so lovely I want to quote the whole thing." Los Angeles Times "Vivid... Means's last collection, Assorted Fire Events was a finalist for the National Book Award...the stories here are just as unsentimental and tightly wound." New York Times Book Review "Achingly intelligent...With his jump-cut shifts, startling connections and breathtaking disconnections the author stands among our most gifted younger writers." New York Times "David Means moves from strength to strength. In these new stories, men and women live lives in which loss and its transcendence combine and become inseparable, making a light that illuminates not only the world on the page, but the larger world beyond. Means is a courageous writer, intelligent and funny and humane. His love for his characters is always evident. The pleasure in reading THE SECRET GOLDFISH is tremendous." Donald Antrim, author of THE VERIFICATIONIST and ELECT MR. ROBINSON FOR A BETTER WORLD "David Means is an anatomist of disaster. His propulsive, riveting, wonderfully atmospheric stories are all poised at the moment of catastrophe, whether natural, automotive or marital. It is Means' signature talent to view the lives of his characters, and life itself, from somewhere just beyond, in a position of maximum understanding and honorable detachment. A semi-divine vantage point for the examination of hopelessly human affairs." Jeffrey Eugenides, author of The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex "David Means is a brilliant new master of the short story who fully understands and respects the form's power. In each of these stories, [he] reveals the truth of our lives the way great art always has - by making us see the world as it painfully is, not as our comfortable habits hide it from us." Milwaukee Journal Sentinel "Means probes a broad range of social registers, from junkies and criminals festering in the post-industrial 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 he precariousness of life in a country that 'could eat anything, absolutely anything, up.'...an imaginative and penetrating collection." (US) Publishers Weekly "In The Secret Goldfish, David Means has all the cylinders running: tremendous precision of language, formal innovation to burn, voices as compelling as they are disturbing. More than the sum of its parts, though, Means' new book is a vibrant sign from a distinct, American tradition. Like the early Allen Ginsberg, the Robert Stone of Dog Soldiers, or the photographs of Nan Goldin, these stories display a kind of angry, unsettled brilliance that somehow allows us to find ourselves by reminding us just how lost we've become." Adam Haslett, author of You Are Not a Stranger Here