David Means, a recognized master of the short story, is the author of four collections of fiction, most recently The Spot (2010). Means’s stories display the compressed intensity of poetry, throwing off little lyrical flares every few sentences. Like Alice Munro, he manipulates time in surprising ways—dilating and contracting, telescoping an entire life, with all its dramas and regrets, into a single paragraph. This effect is especially acute when he writes, as he often does, about events of dramatic import and limited temporal scope. in his novel, the world of Hystopia, takes place in 1960s America, but America at a slant: President Kennedy, survivor of several assassination attempts, has won a third term, escalated the war in Vietnam, and created a federal bureaucracy called the Psych Corps to deal with returning vets. Interesting read!
At www.commonwealmagazine.org
