David Means is one of my favorite writers, and a modern master of the short story. “Assorted Fire Events” is his best book to date, though I am sure there are many more to come. When the book came out, he did an interview with Powell’s.com where he observed, “All really good short stories are open-ended. The bad short stories are the ones that resolve and wind up in a nice neat conclusion. You don’t have room in a short story to close things down. You just have room to give a narrative push and let the reader move forward with whatever happens.”