Yannick Murphy Selected Works

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 that verge on the comic, hovering between the tyrannical and the absurd. 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. 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.

In the cold October of 1917 Margaretha Zelle, better known as Mata Hari, sits in a prison cell in Paris awaiting trial on charges of espionage. The penalty is death by firing squad. As she waits, burdened by a secret guilt, Mata Hari tells stories, Scheherazade-like, to buy back her life from her interrogators. From a bleak childhood in the Netherlands, through a loveless marriage to a Dutch naval officer, Margaretha is transported to the forbidden sensual pleasures of Indonesia. In the chill of her prison cell she spins tales of rosewater baths, native lovers, and Javanese jungles, evoking the magical world that sustained her even as her family crumbled. And then, in flight from her husband, Margaretha reinvents herself: she becomes an artist's model, circus rider, and finally the temple dancer Mata Hari, dressed in veils, admired by Diaghilev, performing for the crowned heads of Europe. Through all her transformations, her life's fatal questions—was she a traitor, and if so, why?—burns ever brighter.

Projecting new kinds of images of sex, violence, and death, this collection of short stories treats such subjects as the allure of violence and the sexual play that binds sister and brother, and father and daughter.

Yannick Murphy's compass is situated under the force of sexual and psychological violence, an eerie dreamscape (that sometimes appears to be in a real China, sometimes in a mythic China, but is never really anywhere exactly) of brutal awakenings, a world not infrequently bracketed by the stunned motion of the fugitives bring produced by a sort of incessant guerrilla warfare that seems forever to be raging just out of sight. The maimed and deperate are everywhere in Yannick Murphy's fiction, people surviving by whatever horrible means they can manage—eating fish eyes, each other's flesh, whatever can be run down under the wheels of a car. Yet it is the family—Mom and Pop and the kids—that turns out to be the most remote and magical and grotesque of the strangely alien settings in which Yannick Murphy lays her stories: fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers glistening with the sweat of sexual complication.

The warm, wry, and patient voice of a veterinarian father tells the heartfelt story of his young New England family enduring a moving trial of loyalty, hope, and faith after they are confronted with an unthinkable crisis. Acclaimed author Yannick Murphy’s intimate narrative style and lovely prose will enthrall readers of Rivka Galchen, Padgett Powell, and Murphy’s own Signed, Mata Hari. The Call is a “triumph of quiet humor and understated beauty” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) from an author that The New York Times Book Review calls “an extraordinarily gifted fabulist.”

In her haunting first novel, Yannick Murphy surveys the landscape of imperialism through the unflinching gaze of an adolescent girl. Set in Indochina in the 1940s—well before American intervention—in the territory that is now Vietnam, it is narrated by the clear-eyed Tian, daughter of a French mother and Chinese father, who is taken prisoner when the Japanese invade Shanghai. The camp is a nightmarish place, where horror sometimes slips surrealistically into comedy as the prisoners watch for liberators to cross the sea of trees that separates them from freedom. Here it is women who become Tian's first allies, especially her passionate young mother and wily amah, who instill pluck, pragmatism, and an unbending will to survive. In a voice that rings with the startling frankness of youth, The Sea of Trees combines imagery both raw and beautiful. Based on stories from the author's own family history and laced with Chinese folklore.

From Yannick Murphy, award-winning author of The Call, comes a fast-paced story of murder, adultery, parenthood, and romance, involving a girls’ swim team, their morally flawed parents, and a killer who swims in their midst.

At a swim meet in their quiet New England town, Annie watches as her daughters glide through the water. Her thoughts drift lazily from whether she fed her daughters enough carbs that morning to why her husband doesn't kiss her anymore, to Paul, a swim-team parent, who's taken notice of her and seems to embody everything she's beginning to think her life is missing.