By the Time You Read This
Stories
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- 16,99 €
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- 16,99 €
Publisher Description
WINNER OF FC2’s CATHERINE DOCTOROW INNOVATIVE FICTION PRIZE
A gathering of luminescent stories that illustrates how fraught and contingent the simplest of lives can be, and the often unexpected means available to each of us for our own salvation
The truths revealed and the lives upended in the 13 stories that make up Yannick Murphy’s By the Time You Read This are at once singularly foreign and uncannily familiar. A wife pens a series of suicide notes to her family that verge on the comic, hovering between the tyrannical and the absurd. A mother obsesses over what her child eats. A young girl left with caretakers in New York draws on her potent imagination with consequences in real life that are both liberating and disastrous. In a college application essay a young woman finally begins to make sense of the troubling vicissitudes of her existence. A young French girl departs for America with her reprehensible beau to find she’s as much a stranger to herself abroad as she was at home. As with her previous novels and story collections, Murphy’s keen rendering of these disparate, complex lives illuminate in ways both quiet and startling our capacity for deliverance and devastation through daring acts of self-invention.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Murphy's canny collection (after This Is the Water) serves up an intriguing and illuminating mix of character studies. In "The Good Word," two American women on vacation abroad meet a German man who invites them to a remote seaside town where they all stay with an old man who competes with his son for attention from the narrator's attractive traveling companion. The unflappable narrator of "Oyster City" receives calls for her celebrity author boss by men claiming to be Deep Throat, and takes to answering as "Little Bo Fucking Peep or Little Red Fucking Riding Hood." Gradually, the understated matter-of-fact tone swells into something more emotionally affecting, as the story becomes about longing for a better life. The title story consists of a suicide note addressed alternately to several recipients, including the writer's husband and 12-year-old daughter: "Dear Paul, by the time you read this, I will be dead; "Dear Cleo, I did this because I love you." Gradually, the note's author reveals her sorrows and regrets, imagining different ways she might end her life and the possible effects that would have on her family members and others. As always, Murphy's cool, minimalist style is undeniably appealing.