Upon its publication, Assorted Fire Events won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, and received tremendous critical praise. Ranging across America, taking in a breathtaking array of voices and experiences, this story collection now stands as one of the finest of our time.

The Spot is an old blacksmith shed in which three men tweeze apart the intricacies of a botched bank robbery. The Spot is a park on the Hudson River, where two lovers sense their affair 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 currents of her own tragic story. The Spot is in the ear of a Manhattan madman plagued by a noisy upstairs neighbor . The Spot is a suburban hospital room in which a young father confronts his son's potentially devastating diagnosis. The Spot is a dusty encampment in Nebraska where a gang of inept radicals plot a revolution. The Spot draws thirteen new stories together into a masterful collection that shows David Means at his finest: at once comically detached and wrenchingly affecting, expansive and concise, wildly inventive and firmly rooted in tradition. Means's work has earned him comparisons to Flannery O'Connor (London Review of Books), Alice Munro, Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac (Newsday), Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson (Chicago Tribune/NPR), Denis Johnson (Entertainment Weekly), Poe, Chekhov, and Carver (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel), but the spot he has staked out in the American literary landscape is fully and originally his own.

At the bitter end of the 1960s, after surviving multiple assassination attempts, President John F. Kennedy has created a vast federal agency, the Psych Corps, dedicated to maintaining the nation's mental hygiene by any means necessary. Soldiers returning from Vietnam have their battlefield traumas "enfolded"-wiped from their memories through drugs and therapy-while veterans too damaged to be enfolded roam at will in Michigan, evading the Psych Corps and reenacting atrocities on civilians. This destabilized, alternate version of American history is the vision of the twenty-two-year-old veteran Eugene Allen, who has returned from Vietnam to write the book at the center of Hystopia, the long-awaited first novel by David Means. In Hystopia, Means brings his full talent to bear on the crazy reality of trauma, both national and personal. Outlandish and tender, funny and violent, timely and historical, Hystopia invites us to consider whether our traumas can ever be truly overcome. The answers it offers are wildly inventive, deeply rooted in its characters, and wrung from the author's own heart.

Upon its publication, Assorted Fire Events won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, and received tremendous critical praise. Ranging across America, taking in a breathtaking array of voices and experiences, this story collection now stands as one of the finest of our time.

An Edgar Award Nominee for Best Novel. Praised by authors and critics around the globe, The Guards is the first novel in the Jack Taylor series and heralded the arrival of prominent Irish writer Ken Bruen as an essential voice in contemporary crime fiction. Still stinging from his unceremonious ouster from the Garda Siochana--The Guards, Ireland's police force--and staring at the world through the smoky bottom of his beer mug, Jack Taylor is stuck in Galway with nothing to look forward to. In his sober moments Jack aspires to become Ireland's best private investigator, not to mention its first--Irish history, full of betrayal and espionage, discourages any profession so closely related to informing. But in truth Jack is teetering on the brink of his life's sharpest edges, his memories of the past cutting deep into his soul and his prospects for the future nonexistent. Nonexistent, that is, until a dazzling woman walks into the bar with a strange request and a rumor about Jack's talent for finding things. Odds are he won't be able to climb off his barstool long enough to get involved with his radiant new client, but when he surprises himself by getting hired, Jack has little idea of what he's getting into. Stark, violent, sharp, and funny, The Guards is an exceptional novel, one that leaves you stunned and breathless, flipping back to the beginning in a mad dash to find Jack Taylor and enter his world all over again. It's an unforgettable story that's gritty, absorbing, and saturated with the rough-edged rhythms of the Galway streets.

Despite J. D. Salinger’s many silences—from the publication of The Catcher in the Rye to his absence from the public eye after 1965 to his death in 2010—the unforgettable characters of his novel and short stories continue to speak to generations of readers and writers. Letters to J. D. Salinger includes more than 150 personal letters addressed to Salinger from well-known writers, editors, critics, journalists, and other luminaries, as well as from students, teachers, and readers around the world, some of whom had just discovered Salinger for the first time. Their voices testify to the lasting impression Salinger’s ideas and emotions have made on so many diverse lives.

This is a book about reading, or rather about the moment when the usual frames of interpretation no longer apply. That is where the Othering Excursion begins. Through disruptive forms of rhetoric, writers discard the structures and norms of the cultural system and use the disorders thus created to suggest what lies beyond it. Cultivating distortion, conceptual blocks and chaotic constructions, their texts flout normal processes of interpretation. Whereas traditional approaches often overlook these disorders or treat them as a form of informational noise, in this study they become the basis of critical reflection. Harding and Martin elaborate a critical concept and a range of reading methods to deal with what seem to be zones of obscurity in literary texts. Cutting across boundaries of race, ethnicity and gender, they treat a wide range of poetry and short fiction that challenges traditional interpretations. Giving new readings of canonical texts, the book examines works by American authors that are widely read and taught, like Elizabeth Bishop, A.R. Ammons, Don DeLillo, Leslie Marmon Silko, or Sandra Cisneros. At the same time, it includes studies of emerging writers like Kate Braverman, Dan Chaon, or Chase Twichell. "There is something deeply moving in witnessing the birth of a new concept. And indeed Wendy Harding and Jacky Martin’s concept of “Othering” is a welcome addition to an already crowded field, where concepts like “difference”, “alterity” or “hybridity” are firmly established. But the new concept is more than an addition, it is more in the nature of a substitution, as it aims to replace the now exhausted concepts, allows the authors to avoid the trivialities of a criticism based on gender and race, and, by focusing on form and language (or style), to recapture the now largely lost intuitions of close reading. This combination of close reading and a firm grasp of theory is one of the attractions of the book. I am impressed by their mastery of the intricacies of theory and the range of their literary corpus (in terms both of genres and texts). I have no doubt that their book will be a major contribution to the renewal of the study of contemporary American literature." —Professor Jean-Jacques Lecercle, University of Nanterre, Paris In Beyond Words, Wendy Harding and Jacky Martin offer “a new attitude to reading” that approaches true diversity by ignoring trends toward traditional groupings of authors by race and gender and instead examining, democratically, recent American literature in terms of its unique and peculiar achievements. In choosing texts that employ “the rhetoric of the inexpressible,” the authors have identified “Othering” as the common thread running through short fiction and poetry by authors as varied as Allen Ginsberg, Raymond Carver, Sandra Cisneros, Adrienne Rich, and Li-Young Lee. In transliterating the language of the ineffable and unspoken, Beyond Words employs its superbly original methodology toward unfolding previously inaccessible layers of meaning and provoking a fuller understanding of the creative process and its cultural milieu. —Michael Waters, Professor of English at Salisbury University, USA "A germinal study from an "other" (in this case, European) perspective of an at once idiosyncratic and indicative range of American texts with a view of how they, themselves, encounter the unexamined and unexpected." —Marilyn Hacker, Professor at City College of New York and CUNY Graduate Center "Invigorating and original, Beyond Words: The Othering Excursion in Contemporary American Literature challenges conventional ways of approaching literary texts. Eschewing binaries, Wendy Harding and Jacky Martin propose a new approach to reading and analyzing the heterogeneity of recent American literature. By juxtaposing both well-known and less-familiar poetry and short fiction by authors as various as Gayl Jones, John Ashbery, Russell Banks, and Marilyn Nelson, Harding and Martin consider a stimulating variety of texts that cross aesthetic, generic, canonical and political boundaries. Harding and Martin’s polysemous approach to literary texts, a procedure they call “othering,” is groundbreaking and enlightening. Beyond Words provides rich insights for scholars and general readers alike. Harding and Martin’s new mapping of American literature is a remarkable achievement, certain to provoke dialogue for decades to come." —Sue Standing, Jane Ruby Professor of English, Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts "In this new book with the apt title Beyond Words: the Othering Excursion in Contemporary American Literature, Wendy Harding and Jacky Martin promise to generate intense conversation about their conceptual approach to reading canonical, as well as newer texts in late twentieth century American literature. Beyond Words favors a shift in thinking about all texts that defy conventional analysis, and it resists the cleavages that it finds in unsatisfactory terms like “alterity” and “hybridity” conceived to account for differences in gender-racial, ethnic, and class contexts. Re-conceiving Othering as a corroborative and complementary methodology rather than a splintered one, Beyond Words invites an illuminating, comprehensive analysis of literary production in late twentieth century American texts." —Helena Woodard, Associate Professor of English, Department of English, University of Texas at Austin, USA