Under the Surface

YANNICK MURPHY’S 12TH BOOK, Things That Are Funny on a Submarine but Not Really (2025), is a coming-of-age story that follows David Sterling—nicknamed “Dead Man” after he notionally dies while fighting a simulated fire—from the waning days of his enlistment as a submariner through his first year of college. But the narrative is not about moving from one world to the next so much as it’s about those worlds collapsing into one another, and about Dead Man coming alive under the pressure.