Two Nurses, Smoking

Means (Instructions for a Funeral) explores the parameters of existence in his dazzling latest. In the title story, two nurses trade war stories over break—one’s about a doomed junkie dubbed Kidney Boy, another about a serial killer fellow nurse—and discover their capacity for love in each other. “Lightning Speaks!” is a hodgepodge of chatter centering on a teenage runaway adrift in the 1960s counterculture movement, while “The Red Dot” recalls the testament of a divorced man who regards the strange apparition of his water-averse ex-wife emerging from a river as a portent. “Stopping Distance” unspools from a bereavement support group, and “Vows” follows the second life of a marriage following a betrayal. In “Clementine, Carmelita, Dog,” a canine describes her memories and experiences while passing from one owner to another. The lovely closer, “The Depletion Prompts,” takes the form of a series of recursive writing prompts, an eminently teachable Barthian meditation that spells out Means’s interest in “the failure of language to reclaim pain,” as described in a prompt to write about the “strange dynamic between the past and the present.” Readers will revel in this robust collection. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Sept.)