It was with the collection Assorted Fire Events that an unknown writer named David Means took critics by surprise, won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and established an international reputation. In this new collection of stories from The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine', and Zoetrope, all of his considerable powers are on display. Means moves with ease from an adulterous affair in Manhattan to the philosophical intricacies of a failed bank robbery to a young prostitute's quasi-biblical plight. Offering, as the critic James Wood has put it, 'an exquisitely precise and sensuous register of an often crazy American reality', Means' stories chart the physics and geography of crime and betrayal with a Dostoevskian fervour, seeking out the intricate relationship between immorality and grace.