IN A BEAR'S EYE - Yannick Murphy

Price: $13.95

After twenty years, In a Bear's Eye marks Yannick Murphy's return, in collection form, to the short story. The title story of this, her second story collection, was recently included in the 2007 O.Henry Prize Stories anthology.


"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."
—Publishers Weekly

"As the story goes, a young female student once approached the notorious Gordon Lish in the halls outside his classroom at NYU after being told she’d have to wait a year to study with him. She said, “I’m Yannick Murphy, and I’m not supposed to be here.” Lish replied, “You’re in.” It is for just this sort of boldness that Murphy’s fiction sings. In a Bear’s Eye, the follow-up to last year’s magnificent Here They Come, offers twenty-four pristinely chiseled stories, each between two and nine pages long. The scenarios in these pieces bulge with death: in “Legacies” a sick woman’s children dicker for what they will take when she’s gone; in “The Only Light to See By” a mother’s young daughter obsesses over the crime scene of a family murdered just down the street. But while many pieces of fiction can be encapsulated by their premise, what makes these stories so kinetic is not what they are but how they’re told—the strange meat stuffed to their bones—and the way any probability or expectation is swiped out from under the reader’s feet."
—The Believer

Yannick Murphy is the author of Stories in Another Language, The Sea of Trees , Here They Come, Signed, Mata Hari, and Ahwoooooooo!, a book for children. The recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a MacDowell Artists’ Colony fellowship, she lives with her husband and three children in Vermont.