Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Instructions for a Funeral: Stories
    Instructions for a Funeral: Stories
    Instructions for a Funeral: Stories
    Audiobook5 hours

    Instructions for a Funeral: Stories

    Written by David Means

    Narrated by David de Vries

    2/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    "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

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Audio
    Release dateApr 23, 2019
    ISBN9781250253286
    Author

    David Means

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

    Related to Instructions for a Funeral

    Related audiobooks

    Short Stories For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Jenny Offill Exerts Herself

      Jan 15, 2020

      I don’t love the language that’s available to talk about this stuff. If you’re not drawn to earnestness, how do you make yourself a more engaged person? The post Jenny Offill Exerts Herself appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Karl Ove Knausgaard Shows You What Makes Life Worth Living

      Sep 20, 2017

      Knausgaard doesn’t write here to understand, but to associate—to get close to truths larger than himself. The post Karl Ove Knausgaard Shows You What Makes Life Worth Living appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      How to Be Lonely: A Booklist

      Oct 12, 2017

      The Door wrecked me in an already wrecked state last January. The book dwells on humans and their secrets and suggests a gruff sort of love that might entail just leaving people alone. The post How to Be Lonely: A Booklist appeared first on The Milli

      4 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Dec 7, 2021

      He wouldin case of divorcelay claim to halfof everythinghe said.Half a sofa,half a TV,half a summerhousehalf a pound of butterhalf a child. The apartment was hishe saidbecause it was in his name.The thing washe loved her. She loved anotherwhose wife

      2 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Brandon Taylor

      Dec 8, 2017

      I started the year thinking about plagues and calamities. Like many people, I felt particularly disturbed by the growing gap between what I felt was my lived reality and what was being reported in the news or in print. I read The Plague by Albert Cam

      2 min read

    • Article

      A Summer Party

      Jun 8, 2021

      Rosemary looked over the party; her parents and her parents’ friends down below on the sod lawn. Seersucker and espadrilles; white cotton dresses; Brazilian jazz; the costumes of their heyday. They drank beer and Long Island iced tea and white wine p

      10 min read

    • Article

      David Berman, Slacker God

      Aug 8, 2019

      David Berman, Slacker God
      3 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by Charles Baudelaire

      Jun 9, 2020

      After my friend and I left the tobacco shop, he carefully sorted his loose change; slipped some small gold coins in his left jacket pocket; into the right went the silver pieces; in his left pants pocket, a handful of centimes; and in the right, a si

      2 min read

    • Article

      A Love Lost, Then Inexplicably Found

      Mar 28, 2022

      Our Wives Under the Sea is an arresting novel that moves quietly. Told from the alternating perspectives of Miri and her wife Leah, the story revolves around the mysterious after-effects of an undersea research mission gone awry. Julia Armfield seaml

      2 min read

    • Article

      Guerrilla Thriller

      Feb 5, 2023

      Guerrilla Thriller
      4 min read

    • Article

      A Writer’s Writer’s Writer: Lydia Davis and the Naked Mind

      Sep 12, 2018

      At a certain point in her life, she realizes it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want not to have a child, or not to have had a child. —Lydia Davis, “A Double Negative” Like many Lydia Davis fans, I sometimes mentall

      7 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Instructions for a Funeral

    2/5

    2 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words