David Means: ‘You can’t take a story and just stretch it out – that does not a novel make’

The celebrated short story writer on getting to grips with the longer form, history as fiction and trying to capture the absurdity of Vietnam

A really excellent short story is a thing that refuses to be faced head on. It folds into itself, circles you back to its beginning and replays endlessly, while some part – the maddening, mesmerising part – remains impenetrable. The American writer David Means, whose four collections span 25 years, is the master of this kind of refusal. His stories, which evoke lives rather than the neat, lone epiphany that’s become the form’s standard, usually operate around an inner concealment, some careful reticence that reveals and compels grace.

“What you hope for,” he offers, speaking in Bryant Park, behind the New York Public Library, “is that you radiate the past behind the story and the future in front of it. You want to end in a way that makes the reader go back and reread and pushes them forward into eternity or whatever the hell’s out there. With a novel you actually have the opposite – you’ve gotta wrap things up.”

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