RaveThe Irish TimesMeans’ forensic awareness working in tandem with a vernacular at once contemporary and folk ... \'El Morro\' is a brilliant fever of a story, reminiscent of Clarice Lispector and Denis Johnson ... With exquisite control and detail, Means pulls up from the moment of occurrence, and twists it, until you are seeing that moment from a vantage point decades into the future, or seeing its formation in decades past. The moment, in this collection, becomes the nucleus around which a life develops ... And the sentences! The rhythm of Means’ sentences, their qualifications and adjustments, moves so that the sentences themselves live and evolve in the moment ... in this collection are waves in this great ocean of human experience, and it’s rare that fiction reflects this experience of existence with such skill and sincerity.
