Adept and assured, David Means's stories are as perceptive as they are provocative, skillfully and startlingly sounding the depths of human emotion.

In Assorted Fire Events we find a major talent honing his skills, a gambler willing to push the limits while, at the same time, taking great care in playing his cards.

A married man carries on an affair with a neighbor, and suddenly his mind whisks him back to his brother's drowning. A recently widowed mother must decide what to do with a video of her honeymoon love-making.

A distraught businessman goes to the railroad tracks to find some sort of comfort and perhaps peace of mind, but finds the exact opposite in a group of young, miscreant men. Sneaking into a wedding reception, a homeless man forever changes the lives of all present. Suburban sprawl leads to disastrous consequences in the Pushcart Prize-winning "What They Did."

In prose that radiates in every direction, Assorted Fire Events exposes the human condition and explores the fragility of those things that we most cherish, establishing David Means as a tremendous new presence in contemporary American literature.