From Publishers Weekly
In 24 brief, impressionistic tales, Murphy (Signed, Mata Hari) delivers an emotional wallop. The title story concerns a widow and her young son attempting to carry on after the suicide of the husband and father—and finding a watchful bear's presence near their house more protective than menacing. Pan, pan, pan, one of the longer stories, is named for the urgency call emitted by a plane that crashes near a lake where a family of three along with the brother-in-law is vacationing. The narrator is the nervous wife, whose small son is enthralled both by the overbearing brother-in-law and by details of the plane crash. Some of the stories capture a vernacular quirkiness, such as Lester, a stream-of-consciousness narrative by an angry urban dweller who's bitter that he'll never get to see the palm trees of Barbados, or the sky's constellations (the Big Zipper, he calls one of them), for that matter. Similarly, in The Beauty in Bulls, two men carry on a perpendicular conversation, one about bullfighting, the other about the rapturous body of a woman, that eventually dovetails into a testosterone-charged assertion of power and might. Murphy's tight, sharp sense of composition and tone renders these short takes more than mere formal exercises. (Feb.)
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Murphy’s boundary-pushing, mind-expanding fiction has the concentration, interiority, and emotional charge of poetry, yet she is a mesmerizing storyteller. In just a few lines, characters flower from the page replete with feelings, memories, dreams, and jerry-rigged wisdom. The author of an earlier short story collection and three intense novels, including the hauntingly beautiful Signed, Mata Hari (2007), Murphy, in her new stories, deepens her inquiry into the mysteries of childhood and the vagaries of mothers whose love for their children can’t quite balance the damage done by brutal husbands or, as in the glinting title story, an O. Henry Prize winner, a beloved husband’s death. Taboo lust seethes; children care for and cajole alcoholic, nearly catatonic mothers; people suffer wounds and weird maladies; a young girl obsessed with the deaths of a family assumes the positions in which the bodies were found; a professor brings a group to South America to search for a lost dog breed; a family vacation is shadowed by a plane wreck. Murphy’s fictional universe is shard-bright, blood-salted, and complexly affecting. --Donna Seaman
Review
In 24 brief, impresssionistic tales, Murphy .. delivers an emotional wallop... Murphy's tight, sharp sense of composition and tone renders these short takes more than mere formal exercises. --Publisher's Weekly, November 19, 2007
Yannick Murphy can do in three pages what takes most writers ten or twenty. Her sentences, many of them pure poetry, pull you in with their effortless beauty, making you laugh one minute, then crushing your heart in the next. You can't stop reading. You can't wait to find out who you'll meet next. You will not forget this poignant, richly textured, and stunning collection. And you have never seen anything like it. --Rebecca Barry
Stories like beautiful black diamonds. Someone has cut you while you were dreaming, slipped them into your muscles, your mind. You may never know just how you've been changed. --Brad Watson
From the Inside Flap
"Yannick Murphy can do in three pages what takes most writers ten or twenty. Her sentences, many of them pure poetry, pull you in with their effortless beauty, making you laugh one minute, then crushing your heart in the next. You can't stop reading. You can't wait to find out who you'll meet next. You will not forget this poignant, richly textured, and stunning collection. And you have never seen anything like it." - Rebecca Barry, author of Later at the Bar
About the Author
Yannick Murphy is the author of Stories in Another Language, The Sea of Trees, Here They Come, Signed, Mata Hari, and Ahwooooooooo!, a book for children. The recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, an NEA Fellowship, and a MacDowell Artists' Colony fellowship, she lives with her husband and three children in Vermont.
