Two Nurses, Smoking

Finalist for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize

A new collection of stories by David Means, a visionary "master of the form" (The Observer).

Two nurses meet in the hospital parking lot to share a cigarette. They flirt and imagine a future together. They tell stories of patients lost and patients saved, of the darkest corners of human suffering and the luminous moments that break through, even here, in the shadow of death.

In David Means’s virtuosic new collection, time unfolds in unexpected way...