David Means

American short story writer and novelist

David Means (born October 17, 1961) is an American short story writer and novelist based in Nyack, New York. His stories have appeared in many publications, including Esquire, The New Yorker, and Harper's. They are frequently set in the Midwest or the Rust Belt, or along the Hudson River in New York.

Born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Means graduated from Loy Norrix High School in 1980. He received his bachelor's degree in 1984 from the College of Wooster, where his I. S. was "Bullfighting in Boston and other Poems". He went to graduate school at Columbia University, where he received an MFA in poetry. He has been a part time member of the English department at Vassar College since 2001. Means is married with two children. James Wood, in The London Review of Books notes that "Means' language offers an exquisitely precise and sensuous register of an often crazy American reality. Sentences gleaming with lustre are sewn through the stories. One will go a long way with a writer possessed of such skill. You can hear the influence of Flannery O'Connor in Means' prose: in the scintillating shiver of the beautiful imagery, in the lack of sentimentality, in the interest in grotesque violence, and gothic tricksterism." Eileen Battersby in The Irish Times has compared Means' work to that of Eudora Welty and John Cheever. Story consultant Robert McKee said, "David Means writes short stories, I suspect, because his arsenal of prose techniques is so diverse, he needs hundreds of tellings to explore them all." His first novel Hystopia was long listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2016.

Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo Interviews, Faux Lectures, Quasi Letters, "Found" Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts, edited by David Shields and Matthew Vollmer, W. W. Norton, 2012