Two Nurses, Smoking

David Means is one of the best storytellers of our time. Having earned comparisons to Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, and Denis Johnson, he has spent a lifetime honing a unique vision and has gained a devoted international readership. Two Nurses, Smoking is the fullest expression yet of the themes of trauma, hope, love, and despair that have defined his work across five acclaimed collections and the novel Hystopia.

In the Covid era, these stories of survival and healing in the midst of loss, grief, and isolation offer us catharsis, compassion, and wisdom. Two nurses stand alone together in a hospital parking lot, smoking and speaking tenderly to each other. A dachshund raises her nose and catches the scent of her former owner in the wind one afternoon. A woman with an intense phobia of water appears on the Hudson River in a red kayak. On the porch of a mental hospital, two friends talk about a ball of lightning. A couple who met in a bereavement group in a church basement stand reunited at the bottom of a ski slope. Always original, always arresting, Means' ingenious stories build around intimate moments to form an expansive sense of what it means to be fully human.

“Vows,” included here, was awarded a Pushcart Prize. Other stories have been celebrated by Jesmyn Ward, who featured “Clementine, Carmalita, Dog,” in Best American Short Stories 2021, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who selected the title story for the O. Henry Prize, writing that it “left me weeping.”