Advance Praise for Read by Strangers

 

 

“Philip Dean Walker’s Read by Strangers is a nightmare wrapped in a riddle dipped in epiphany. His attention to detail, especially in his characters, makes living, breathing, complicated people heft themselves out of the page, fully-formed creatures from his madcap lagoon. Particularly the way he sees inside women and their often secret, darkest views on motherhood, on aging, on desire, on the aging of their once desirable husbands…he embodies the night-vines of our own admissions, those that sneak up our chests and wind around our throats.”

—Julia Whelan, author of My Oxford Year

 

“The stories that comprise Philip Dean Walker’s Read by Strangers are sexually frank, intriguingly open-ended, and nuanced in their depictions of flawed human nature. Walker is a talented and observant storyteller whose plots and characterizations engage and unnerve in equal measures.”

—Wally Lamb, author of I Know This Much Is True

 

“Vividly and bitingly rendered, these stories often made me morally and even politically uncomfortable, which might well be the point. Highly reminiscent of John Cheever, Richard Yates, Bret Easton Ellis and others who excelled at writing people, especially women, at their lowest, Read by Strangers seems confident in its sometimes surreal cruelties, perhaps to try to shake us out of our own worst instincts.”

—Tim Murphy, author of Christodora

 

“Philip Dean Walker’s writing in Read by Strangers is precise as a tuning fork, full of sentences whose beauty left me trembling and characters at the edge of unraveling who pulled me to precipices. These stories vibrate in the spaces of absence and desire, in what lurks in legend, in the uncertain waters of the fringe. Walker has a knack for knowing what’s just out of reach, what humans risk slipping into, and in these pages he brings us to the recesses of unlit hallways from which a person, a reader, a character, return absolutely changed. A moving, gripping collection to stay up late with.”

—Angela Palm, author of Riverine:
A Memoir from Anywhere but Here

 

“Walker’s sophomore effort is as sharply written and rich with character detail as his debut collection, though these stories feel a bit more personal, a bit more complex and grounded with a subtle and profound beauty.”

—Scott Hess, author of Skyscraper

 

“As much as it is a collection of stories, Philip Dean Walker’s Read by Strangers is a collection of characters. He documents the basic human struggle against the inertia of everyday life. He confronts loss and the possibility of loss. Hopes and the impossibility of hope. Most importantly, he celebrates small moments and locates humanness in corners of the world most other authors don’t even think to look.”

—Zach Powers, author of Gravity Changes