The Spot: Stories

Synopsis

The Spot is an old blacksmith shed in which a gang of men tweeze apart the intricacies of a botched bank robbery.

The Spot is a place deep in Riverside Park, along the Hudson River, where two lovers walk with a keen sense that their adultery is about to come to an end.

The Spot is at the bottom of Niagara Falls, where the body of a young girl floats as if caught in the tangled currents of her own tragic story.

The Spot lies in the eardrum of a madman plagued by a noisy upstairs neighbor on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

The Spot is a place in a young father’s mind where love, fear, and responsibility merge in the struggle with his son’s potentially devastating diagnosis.

The Spot is in a dusty encampment in Nebraska where a gang of inept radicals plot a revolution.

The Spot is a Depression-era rail junction in Michigan where a young hobo spins the story of his return to a place that reminds him of home.

The Spot is in Oklahoma City, where two homeless girls move amid a memorial of outdoor stone chairs, sitting down and standing up, leaving impressions in the snow on the dark stone seats.

The Spot is the new book by the award-winning, internationally acclaimed author of Assorted Fire Events, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and The Secret Goldfish.

The Spot is a collection of stories by an author who, according to The New York Times, “stands among our most gifted younger writers,” a writer whose language, in the words of James Wood, “offers an exquisitely precise and sensuous register of an often crazy American reality.”

Publishers Weekly

A natural storyteller, Means (The Secret Goldfish) presents 13 nuanced tales of wanderlust and transgression. Hoboes around a campfire spin elaborate yarns in two of the richest stories, offering just enough confession to keep the others' interest: “The Blade” finds an improbable friendship between an old geezer and a young junkie, culminating in a requisite “blade-to-the-throat” story; while “The Junction” pursues a vagrant who begs food at a farmhouse that is strikingly similar to the home he grew up in. The American landscape is vividly sketched in these tales, traversed by the Bonnie-and-Clyde meets Charles Starkweather team of young bank robbers in “Nebraska,” and the manipulative con man of “Oklahoma.” Similarly, the title story details a jaunty pimp's shameless exploitation of a girl with a horrific past, culminating in a grim discovery at Niagara Falls. There's not an off note to be found in Means's prose, and he proves to be remarkably adept at locating the sublime in the unseemly. (June)