LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE Named a Best of the Year Selection by Kirkus Reviews, the San Francisco Chronicle, Commonweal Magazine, and the Library of Michigan In his widely acclaimed and ambitious debut novel, David Means, one of America’s greatest living short story writers, has produced a disorienting yet mesmerizing novel-within-a-novel. Twenty-two year old Eugene Allen, a Vietnam War veteran, has penned a revisionist history of the period that, channeled through Means, explores the realities of trauma, both national and personal. Consider Allen’s imaginative register: John F. Kennedy has survived multiple attempts on his life and is entering his third term. Meanwhile, as the Vietnam War continues to wage, soldiers returning home face two fates: have their memories of war erased or, if they are too damaged for treatment, be released without monitor. But pain and their toxic strains of PTSD ultimately creates a band of deranged rogues, evading the government and reenacting atrocities on their own people. Outlandish and tender, funny and violent, timely and historical, Hystopia invites us to consider whether our traumas can ever truly be overcome. The answers it offers are wildly inventive, deeply rooted in its characters, and wrung from the author’s own heart. “The most ambitious novel of 2016 so far, Hystopia might also be the last thing we expected in a first novel by the veteran storyteller David Means: a counterfactual narrative by a Vietnam veteran about his experience in a therapeutic, psychedelics-based trauma recovery program initiated by an unassassinated John F. Kennedy, with a Kinbote–like editorial apparatus attached. The concept is high, but the hardscrabble Means we’ve known for years is still present and in command.” ―Christian Lorentzen, New York “Supremely gonzo and supremely good . . . If Flannery O'Connor had written about Vietnam, Rake is the kind of character she would have created. . . What is the relation between the chaos of lived experience and the coherence of narrative? How is trauma tied to the fracturing of narrative, to our inability to see the past as past, distinct from, yet leading to the present?” ―Anthony Domestico, The Boston Globe “ Hystopia quickly gains momentum and plausibility thanks to its richness of detail. Means is a writer of dazzling gifts: a challenging stylist and a keen observer whose senses seem, at times, pitched to a state of hyperawareness . . .Means writes beautifully about the natural world, effortlessly conjuring the sound of wind, the smell of Lake Michigan through the pines, 'the dry, lonely sizzle of cicadas going about their afternoon business.” ―Jay McInerney, The New York Times Book Review “[A] wild, multi-layered and deeply affecting novel . . . Means conjures a haunting, almost dreamlike aesthetic akin to that of Terrence Malick’s 1973 film Badlands . His eye for detail is microscopic, and the natural world in particular is beautifully evoked . . . this rich novel takes us far beyond Vietnam-era America; it is a potent examination of what makes, and keeps, us human.” ―Francesca Wade, Financial Times “David Means’s Hystopia is the boldest alternate history novel in years . . . A debut novel that reinvents a genre . . . In his fidelity to a peculiarly American brokenness, Means’ debut surpasses nearly all of his recent peers.” ― Flavorwire “ Hystopia by David Means is a fascinating novel within a novel. Complex without being confusing, the novel weaves Eugene’s own battles with mental illness and his sister’s disappearance into a beautiful, haunting tale of loss.” ―Nancy Hightower, The Washington Post " Hystopia , David Means’s dark acid trip of a novel, reads like a phantasmagorical . . . mash-up of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jes t, Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Michael Herr’s Vietnam classic, Dispatches . . . It's a meditation on war (not just Vietnam, Mr. Means suggests, but the continuum of combat that links veterans through history) and the toll it takes on soldiers and families and loved ones. It's also a portrait of a troubled America in the late 1960s and early '70s--an America reeling from unemployment and lost dreams, and seething with anger, and uncannily familiar, in many ways, to America today.” ―Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times " Hystopia , which follows a group of Vietnam War veterans trying to piece together what has happened to them, is a story about storytelling and the splintered shards through which accounts of trauma demand to be told. Here we find Means pushing on the structural bounds of the novel, testing their soundness to collect the disjointedness of unformulated experience. The effect is powerful and expansive . . . Hystopia gets at how storytelling is potentially therapeutic, alleviating the burden by sharing with others, but also fraught with outsider misunderstanding. ―Chantal McStay, BOMB “[ Hystopia ]