Read by Strangers

"Walker’s scintillating stories crackle with frank sexuality and deadpan comedy. There’s a satirical edge to many of them, but they are always grounded in prose that’s realistic but extraordinarily vivid and even nightmarish." - Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“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 oft en 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 fl awed 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 oft en 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