David Means is an American writer based in Nyack, New York. His short stories have appeared in many publications, including Esquire, The New Yorker, McSweeney's, and Harper's. They are frequently set in the Midwest or the Rust Belt, or along the Hudson River in New York. He includes among his influences artist Edward Hopper, who is also from Nyack, New York. Contemporary Authors writes: "With Means's second collection, Assorted Fire Events: Stories, he was compared favorably to such esteemed writers as Raymond Carver and Alice Munro and praised by critics for his sharp prose." James Wood, in The London Review of Books notes that "Means' language offers an exquisitely precise and sensuous register of an often crazy American reality. Sentences gleaming with lustre are sewen through the stories. One will go a long way with a writer possessed of such skill. You can hear the influence of Flannery O'Connor in Means' prose: in the scintillating shiver of the beautiful imagery, in the lack of sentimentality, in the interest in grotesque violence, and gothic tricksterism." He is a professor of English at Vassar College.