Recently Published Pieces

The world of work, life, and love changed seismically in the early 2000’s and Sean Murphy’s narrator Byron, like everyone else, has been scrambling to keep up ever since…or wondering whether keeping up is even possible. In Not to Mention a Nice Life, Murphy’s masterful storytelling takes us on an honest, searing, sardonic ride through the decade that wasn’t.

 

-Jeremy Neuner, co-author of The Rise of the Naked Economy

May 22, 2015

“When I started Sean's book, I read a section and said to myself, ‘I'm going to email Sean to tell him how amazing that sentence is.’ Then as I read a little further I thought, ‘No, I'm going to email Sean to tell him what an amazing depth of knowledge and perception he's giving us.’ And then, yes, you got it, on the very next page he wrote something that made me think, ‘His Mom is looking down on Sean with unending love for what he just wrote. This is one amazing book!”

–Donald R. Gallehr, Director Emeritus, Northern Virginia Writing Project

May 27, 2015

It’s early in that lamentable decade of the 2000s, and while the good times continue to roll in corporate America, they won’t be rolling for much longer—and no one knows it better than Byron, the Everyman narrator of Sean Murphy’s witty and wise firecracker of a debut. If you liked Joshua Ferris’s AND THEN WE CAME TO THE END, you’ll love NOT TO MENTION A NICE LIFE. Byron might not have a future, but Sean Murphy certainly does.

–Greg Olear, author of Totally Killer and Fathermucker

May 22, 2015

Please Talk about Me When I’m Gone, which pulled me in from the first page and never let go, is a mosaic love letter from a son to his lost mother, so everyone in the bereavement club should read it. But this memoir is also a thoughtful, compassionate meditation on being alive. I nodded in recognition, dog-eared pages containing lines I loved, felt my eyes well with tears. In the end you should read it for the reason anyone reads good writing: to feel less alone.”

—Jenna Blum, NYT best-selling author of Those Who Save Us and The Stormchasers

May 27, 2015