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You are a human animal. You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read?

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

I'm Michael Silverblatt.

And today my guest is the author David Means. He's just published recently,

a collection of stories called Assorted Fire Events by a new publisher to us, Context Books.

The book won the LA Times Literary Award. In a sense, it was quite an upheaval in that among the other

nominations were Philip Roth, Joy Williams, several others. And a new writer to most came up

to accept the award for his book Assorted Fire Events.

It's his second book of short stories.

The first book was called Quick Kiss of Redemption.

Now, first of all, what does it feel for a writer to win an award among such prestigious possible winners?

At some level it feels fantastic, great to beat Philip Roth and who I think is the biggest name among the group.

But it also feels strange, problematic.

In what way?

Well, you want to celebrate and you want to run around and be happy about it.

But on the other side of the coin,

there's the sense, at least with me, of maybe...

It's not a sense of not deserving it,

but it's... And even saying this makes me feel like it's kind of a false humility, but it's a sense of just the complexity of what you're doing and the literary endeavor and how good these other writers really are.

...