Hystopia (Means)

Author Bio
• Birth—October 17, 1961
• Where—Kalamazoo, Michigan., USA
• Education—B.A., College of Wooster; M.F.A., Columbia University
• Currently—lives in Nyack, New York


David Means is an American author of several short story collections and the 2016 novel Hystopia. He has been a part-time member of the English department at Vassar College since 2001 and lives in Nyack, New York, along the Hudson River. He and his wife have two children.

Education
Born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Means graduated from Loy Norrix High School in and received his bachelor's degree in 1984 from the College of Wooster. He went to graduate school at Columbia University where he received an MFA in poetry.

Work
Hystopia, Means's 2016 novel, presents an alternate version of history in which John F. Kennedy survived the assassination attempt and is in his third presidential term. The story focuses on the horrors of the Vietnam War, which Kennedy prosecutes with determination. Various comparisons have been made to David Foster Wallace, Charlie Kaufman, Kazuo Ishiguro, and even Hemingway.

In addition to his collections, Means's 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. Means has been compared to such writers as Raymond Carver and Alice Munro while Eileen Battersby in the Irish Times compared him to Eudora Welty and John Cheever. Praised for his sharp prose, James Wood in the London Review of Books wrote...

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.

(Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/23/2016.)