By the Time You Read This

“Darkly funny, brilliantly absurd, insightful, poignant, and often heartbreaking, the stories in Yannick Murphy’s career-spanning collection, By the Time You Read This, affirm her place among the best of our writers. Each is a wry, sparkling testimony to our struggles to connect in family, love, and friendship. Her narrators reach for ‘the speech of the heart,’ whether from the depths of a submarine, or in an extended suicide note. Like Rachel Cusk, Murphy has invented a language all her own.”- Kate Walbert, author of His Favorites and A Short History of Women;

“Murphy’s canny collection (after This Is the Water) serves up an intriguing and illuminating mix of character studies. As always, Murphy’s cool, minimalist style is undeniably appealing.”- Publishers Weekly;

“Rhythmic and razor sharp, Murphy’s writing deftly catches hold of the lives of her characters in a glance and then, before you know it, delicately reveals them in all their pain and wonder. Whether she’s talking about a young man struggling with life on a submarine, a woman on the verge of turning her life upside down, or a neighbor watching the same video of his wife over and over again, she cuts quickly and deeply to the heart of what it means to be human and yet, even after that surgery, her characters remain whole and astonishingly alive.”- Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World;

“A magic word is an elixir of happiness and there’s a rich little girl with a doll her size and an outsized dog who mothers kittens and a mother who jumps on a bed for fun- what’s not to like?- in these bewitching stories from the one and only Yannick Murphy! By the Time You Read This: read it soon.”- Christine Schutt, author of Pure Hollywood.